Would you believe that Thomas Jefferson was the Barack Obama of his day? Jefferson, although very popular with the people, was also relentlessly and maliciously excoriated and slandered by his political enemies, the Federalist Party. The Federalist Party was the party of the wealthy and merchant classes and worked to protect their interests, not unlike the Republican party of today. The Federalist Party came to Power with John Adams and used government to enrich themselves and their cronies. The Federalists believed that the country should be ruled by those who had the most to lose, which in those days meant the merchants and the aristocracy. It was during this time that congress passed the Alien and Sedition acts, which, among other things, made it illegal to criticize the Government. The bill had sweeping government powers similar to the Patriot Act of the Bush administration. Thomas Jefferson was elected to put an end to this abuse of authority and fiscal mismanagement. That’s when the floodgates of hate opened up on him. After Jefferson took office the Federalists relentlessly opposed everything Jefferson tried to do. In fact, for the eight years Jefferson was in office they supported only one decision, which was to threaten war with Great Britain over trade embargos. The support so startled Jefferson that he wrote, “ I began to wonder if I had made the right decision.” The Federalists made use of the newspapers they controlled. They also printed broadsides and political cartoons to so vilify the President that one Lady was shocked to find after meeting Jefferson that he was not the monster the Federalist press made him out to be; “ Is this the violent Democrat, the vulgar demagogue, the bold atheist and profligate man I have so often heard denounced by the Federalists?... can he be that daring leader of a faction, that disturber of the peace, that enemy of all rank and order? I felt that I had been the victim of prejudice, that I had been unjust… Not only was he great, but a truly good man!”
One biographer of Jefferson wrote,” He suffered open personal attacks which in severity and obscenity have rarely if ever been matched in presidential history in the United States.” Until now it seems.
The evil persona they created for him did not defeat him, as Jefferson’s eldest grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph noted: “ In speaking of the calumnies which his enemies had uttered against his public and private character with such unmitigated and untiring bitterness he said…they had not known him. They had created an imaginary being clothed with odious attributes, to whom they had given his name; and it was against this creature of their imaginations that they leveled their anathemas.” Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh anyone?
The malicious slander continued unabated for his entire Presidency and the level of hatred for him was as rabid as any teabagger of today against Barack Obama.
Historical note for the current crop of Oligarchs: Your methods work only for a season and then people wise up, although someone wrote that the great mystery of our democracy was why poor people would elect rich people and send them to congress where they pass laws that benefit rich people. As Lincoln said, “You can’t fool all the people all the time.”
So, be patient my fellow Americans, you Real Americans, the beauty of our Democracy, despite its great mystery, is that failed political philosophies, like that of the Republicans, will finally show themselves for what they are and go the way of the Federalist Party and the Dodo Bird.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Friday, March 14, 2008
Intro to my Doctoral Dissertation
A Study of the New Harmony Gazette and Its Attempts to Establish or Reinforce Community Core Values in the Owenite Community of New Harmony, Indiana, from 1825 to 1827
byMichael Clark
A dissertation submitted to the Department of Adult Learning and Technology and the Graduate School of the University of Wyoming
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in EDUCATION
Laramie, Wyoming
December 2001
Acknowledgements:
I want to thank my wife, Pam, without whose example and emotional support I would not have been able to complete this program. This study is a culmination of four years of collaborative effort and is a joint dissertation in spirit, if not in fact. My family has been an influence in my educational pursuits. My grandparents John and Hattie Gibson, and Dave and Gladys Clark raised families during the social upheavals of the 1920s and 30s and typified those workers who sought social justice and the utopian ideal. My parents Sam and Johnnie instilled a love of lifelong learning and supported all my endeavors. My daughter April, who, while I was busy making a dissertation, was busy making me a grandpa. And so it goes. Also, I would like to express my appreciation to the members of the historic Utah Cohort, who made the long treks and the long hours in class a genuinely pleasant experience. I would like to thank Dr. Michael Day for pointing the way, and his right arm, Kris Brewer, for marking the trail. Finally, I want to thank all the University of Wyoming instructors who gave their weekends to bring this program to the boonies and all the members of my committee who have inspired me to make this dissertation a true research project of historical importance.
Dedication :
This study is dedicated to the seekers of utopia—whatever it may be. My king and conqueror, Utopus by name, a prince of much renown and immortal fame, has made of me an isle that erst no island was,frought full of worldly wealth, pleasure, and solace (More, 1516/1947, p. 181).
Down the track came a hobo hikin’ And he said, Boys, I’m not turning,
I’m headed for a land that’s far away Beside the crystal fountain,
So come with me, we’ll go and see The big Rock Candy Mountain.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, There’s a land that’s fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes, And you sleep out every night,
Where the boxcars all are empty, And the sun shines every day,
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees,
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, All the cops have wooden legs,
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth And the hens lay soft boiled eggs.
The farmers’ trees are full of fruit, And the barns are full of hay.
Oh I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow,
Where there ain’t no foe, the wind don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, You never change your socks,
And the little streams of alcohol Come trickling down the rocks,
The brakemen have to tip their hats, And the railroad bulls are blind,
There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey, too,
You can paddle all around ‘em in a big canoe,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, The jails are made of tin,
And you can walk right out again As soon as you are in.
There ain’t no short-handled shovels, No axes, saws, or picks.
I’m a going to stay where you sleep all day, Where they hung the Turk who invented work.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
I’ll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.--
hobo song circa 1928
Words and music by Harry McClintock
Preface:
These studies began as an assignment in a class on the History of Adult Education taught by Dr. Michael Day at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Day included utopian communities as one of several areas of study within the course of Adult Education. A required text for this course, Stubblefield and Keane’s (1994) Adult Education in the American Experience included utopian experiments as a section in a chapter on the spread of literacy. According to Stubblefield and Keane: To realize the promise of America required an educated and disciplined commitment to new values, represented by a variety of social and ideological viewpoints. These [utopian experiments] extended the notion of individual perfectibility to one of communal perfectibility, using education as the driving force of social change. The reformers planned to effect change in small communities, which would then become educational models for wider use. (p. 73)At first we were surprised to see this topic included within the field of adult education, but upon closer examination, we realized it makes perfect sense. As teachers ourselves, we believe a utopian lives in the soul of every educator. What else is education, if not a dream – utopian in the best sense of that word – a dream that individuals can be “transformed” (ala Jack Mezirow and Paulo Freire) in ways that will allow them to improve their lives, both individually and collectively; a dream that poverty, prejudice, and violence can end, that communities can be safer and healthier places to live and to raise families? As teachers, don’t we attempt to create a utopia within our individual classrooms—a place where students can feel safe and accepted, a community where students might get along with each other, an environment that will unlock the natural love of learning within every one of our students? It is small wonder that so many educators have also been leaders of utopian societies, or that leaders of utopian societies have been educators. From Plato to Robert Owen, from Bronson Alcott to Myles Horton, educators are synonymous with utopians, and their idealism is contagious. A single assignment to study utopians Frances Wright, Robert Owen, and B. F. Skinner grew into a review of the history of utopian experiments from Plato to Synanon. In the process of conducting this review, we became intrigued with the question of how utopian colonies, particularly nonsectarian communities, attempted to reinforce and transmit their core values among their members. We learned that many utopian colonies in America published newspapers, and we became interested in learning more about the connection between these newspapers and their communities’ values, particularly in those colonies that organized around political rather than religious ideals.
Michael’s Path to New Harmony, Indiana
The path that led Michael to New Harmony began with reading Pedlar’s Progress, the Life of Bronson Alcott (Shepard, 1937), which led to the utopian experiment at Fruitlands and to other experimental communities that attempted to put utopian philosophies into practice. While exploring these, Michael learned about the Owenite community at New Harmony, Indiana, and was interested in learning more. When he discovered that the University of Wyoming had the complete edition of the New Harmony Gazette on microfiche, he determined to explore the role of that newspaper as a tool for education in the utopian colony of New Harmony.
Pamela’s Path to the Colorado Cooperative Colony:
During Pamela’s exploration of utopian colonies, some friends mentioned that the community where they had previously taught in Colorado had begun as a utopian colony. She investigated this community and found only one unpublished and two published histories about it. The most recent, Marie Templeton’s (1975) work, The Visionaries: First and Second Generation Pioneers of the Pinon, Ute and Nucla Areas, consists of short remembrances of 21 former colony members. The earlier history, Spell of the Tabeguache, was written in 1957 by Ellen Zatterstrom Peterson whose father uprooted his family from their home in Minnesota to resettle at the Colorado Cooperative Colony in 1900. The unpublished study, “A History of the Colorado Co-operative Colony, and the Town of Nucla” was written by Frances H. Croke (n.d.) and tells the history of the colony primarily through articles published in the Montrose Enterprise and the Montrose Press. All three of these histories referenced a colony newspaper by the name of The Altrurian, which sent Pamela to the newspaper offices and to the library in Nucla, Colorado, to inquire as to this newspaper’s whereabouts. The Altrurian was not available in Nucla, but four copies were available at the historical museum in Naturita. A bit more sleuthing resulted in the discovery of two microfilm records of The Altrurian, one housed at the Colorado Historical Society, which includes 85 of the 135 issues published; and the other at the Kansas State Historical Society, which includes 124 of the 135 issues published. This discovery prompted her decision to make this community and its newspaper the subject of her study.Because the topics are so similar, because the impetus for doing the research was essentially the same, and because the topic of community itself suggests collaboration, this work began with a vision of doing a joint dissertation.
This vision evolved into two parallel dissertations, and finally into the current collaborative format with a co-authored first chapter and final chapter. Chapter 1 discusses the background, the significance of the study, and the methodology, all of which are the same for both dissertations. Though both researchers used the same methodology and were guided by the same research question, the research is unique to the two communities, and differences in writing style and research voice become apparent beginning with Chapter 2, where the authors diverge to study their respective communities and their newspapers in greater depth. Likewise, differences necessarily existed in the historical context of the communities, the analyses of the individual newspapers, the results of the analyses, and the conclusions drawn, all of which comprise chapters 2 through 6 of the individual studies. The authors reunite in Chapter 7 to compare their respective results. It is hoped that the reader will accept and appreciate these innovative studies.
byMichael Clark
A dissertation submitted to the Department of Adult Learning and Technology and the Graduate School of the University of Wyoming
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in EDUCATION
Laramie, Wyoming
December 2001
Acknowledgements:
I want to thank my wife, Pam, without whose example and emotional support I would not have been able to complete this program. This study is a culmination of four years of collaborative effort and is a joint dissertation in spirit, if not in fact. My family has been an influence in my educational pursuits. My grandparents John and Hattie Gibson, and Dave and Gladys Clark raised families during the social upheavals of the 1920s and 30s and typified those workers who sought social justice and the utopian ideal. My parents Sam and Johnnie instilled a love of lifelong learning and supported all my endeavors. My daughter April, who, while I was busy making a dissertation, was busy making me a grandpa. And so it goes. Also, I would like to express my appreciation to the members of the historic Utah Cohort, who made the long treks and the long hours in class a genuinely pleasant experience. I would like to thank Dr. Michael Day for pointing the way, and his right arm, Kris Brewer, for marking the trail. Finally, I want to thank all the University of Wyoming instructors who gave their weekends to bring this program to the boonies and all the members of my committee who have inspired me to make this dissertation a true research project of historical importance.
Dedication :
This study is dedicated to the seekers of utopia—whatever it may be. My king and conqueror, Utopus by name, a prince of much renown and immortal fame, has made of me an isle that erst no island was,frought full of worldly wealth, pleasure, and solace (More, 1516/1947, p. 181).
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
One evening as the sun went down And the jungle fires was burning,Down the track came a hobo hikin’ And he said, Boys, I’m not turning,
I’m headed for a land that’s far away Beside the crystal fountain,
So come with me, we’ll go and see The big Rock Candy Mountain.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, There’s a land that’s fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes, And you sleep out every night,
Where the boxcars all are empty, And the sun shines every day,
On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees,
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, All the cops have wooden legs,
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth And the hens lay soft boiled eggs.
The farmers’ trees are full of fruit, And the barns are full of hay.
Oh I’m bound to go where there ain’t no snow,
Where there ain’t no foe, the wind don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, You never change your socks,
And the little streams of alcohol Come trickling down the rocks,
The brakemen have to tip their hats, And the railroad bulls are blind,
There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey, too,
You can paddle all around ‘em in a big canoe,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain, The jails are made of tin,
And you can walk right out again As soon as you are in.
There ain’t no short-handled shovels, No axes, saws, or picks.
I’m a going to stay where you sleep all day, Where they hung the Turk who invented work.
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
I’ll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.--
hobo song circa 1928
Words and music by Harry McClintock
Preface:
These studies began as an assignment in a class on the History of Adult Education taught by Dr. Michael Day at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Day included utopian communities as one of several areas of study within the course of Adult Education. A required text for this course, Stubblefield and Keane’s (1994) Adult Education in the American Experience included utopian experiments as a section in a chapter on the spread of literacy. According to Stubblefield and Keane: To realize the promise of America required an educated and disciplined commitment to new values, represented by a variety of social and ideological viewpoints. These [utopian experiments] extended the notion of individual perfectibility to one of communal perfectibility, using education as the driving force of social change. The reformers planned to effect change in small communities, which would then become educational models for wider use. (p. 73)At first we were surprised to see this topic included within the field of adult education, but upon closer examination, we realized it makes perfect sense. As teachers ourselves, we believe a utopian lives in the soul of every educator. What else is education, if not a dream – utopian in the best sense of that word – a dream that individuals can be “transformed” (ala Jack Mezirow and Paulo Freire) in ways that will allow them to improve their lives, both individually and collectively; a dream that poverty, prejudice, and violence can end, that communities can be safer and healthier places to live and to raise families? As teachers, don’t we attempt to create a utopia within our individual classrooms—a place where students can feel safe and accepted, a community where students might get along with each other, an environment that will unlock the natural love of learning within every one of our students? It is small wonder that so many educators have also been leaders of utopian societies, or that leaders of utopian societies have been educators. From Plato to Robert Owen, from Bronson Alcott to Myles Horton, educators are synonymous with utopians, and their idealism is contagious. A single assignment to study utopians Frances Wright, Robert Owen, and B. F. Skinner grew into a review of the history of utopian experiments from Plato to Synanon. In the process of conducting this review, we became intrigued with the question of how utopian colonies, particularly nonsectarian communities, attempted to reinforce and transmit their core values among their members. We learned that many utopian colonies in America published newspapers, and we became interested in learning more about the connection between these newspapers and their communities’ values, particularly in those colonies that organized around political rather than religious ideals.
Michael’s Path to New Harmony, Indiana
The path that led Michael to New Harmony began with reading Pedlar’s Progress, the Life of Bronson Alcott (Shepard, 1937), which led to the utopian experiment at Fruitlands and to other experimental communities that attempted to put utopian philosophies into practice. While exploring these, Michael learned about the Owenite community at New Harmony, Indiana, and was interested in learning more. When he discovered that the University of Wyoming had the complete edition of the New Harmony Gazette on microfiche, he determined to explore the role of that newspaper as a tool for education in the utopian colony of New Harmony.
Pamela’s Path to the Colorado Cooperative Colony:
During Pamela’s exploration of utopian colonies, some friends mentioned that the community where they had previously taught in Colorado had begun as a utopian colony. She investigated this community and found only one unpublished and two published histories about it. The most recent, Marie Templeton’s (1975) work, The Visionaries: First and Second Generation Pioneers of the Pinon, Ute and Nucla Areas, consists of short remembrances of 21 former colony members. The earlier history, Spell of the Tabeguache, was written in 1957 by Ellen Zatterstrom Peterson whose father uprooted his family from their home in Minnesota to resettle at the Colorado Cooperative Colony in 1900. The unpublished study, “A History of the Colorado Co-operative Colony, and the Town of Nucla” was written by Frances H. Croke (n.d.) and tells the history of the colony primarily through articles published in the Montrose Enterprise and the Montrose Press. All three of these histories referenced a colony newspaper by the name of The Altrurian, which sent Pamela to the newspaper offices and to the library in Nucla, Colorado, to inquire as to this newspaper’s whereabouts. The Altrurian was not available in Nucla, but four copies were available at the historical museum in Naturita. A bit more sleuthing resulted in the discovery of two microfilm records of The Altrurian, one housed at the Colorado Historical Society, which includes 85 of the 135 issues published; and the other at the Kansas State Historical Society, which includes 124 of the 135 issues published. This discovery prompted her decision to make this community and its newspaper the subject of her study.Because the topics are so similar, because the impetus for doing the research was essentially the same, and because the topic of community itself suggests collaboration, this work began with a vision of doing a joint dissertation.
This vision evolved into two parallel dissertations, and finally into the current collaborative format with a co-authored first chapter and final chapter. Chapter 1 discusses the background, the significance of the study, and the methodology, all of which are the same for both dissertations. Though both researchers used the same methodology and were guided by the same research question, the research is unique to the two communities, and differences in writing style and research voice become apparent beginning with Chapter 2, where the authors diverge to study their respective communities and their newspapers in greater depth. Likewise, differences necessarily existed in the historical context of the communities, the analyses of the individual newspapers, the results of the analyses, and the conclusions drawn, all of which comprise chapters 2 through 6 of the individual studies. The authors reunite in Chapter 7 to compare their respective results. It is hoped that the reader will accept and appreciate these innovative studies.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Chapter 3: The Owenite Community at New Harmony, Ind.
Chapter 3: The History of Owenite New Harmony
I’m sitting on a bench outside the Rapp mansion in New Harmony, Indiana. The air is fragrant with the scent of roses and lavender. Across the yard, past the burial mound of Thomas Say, I can see the old Harmonist granary, which was totally rebuilt and restored by Kenneth Dale Owen, the last surviving direct descendent of the Owen family. After a fire in 1878 destroyed the roof and top two floors, the stone walls of the first floor gradually piled in on each other, not unlike the community of New Harmony itself under Robert Owen, which started out with so much promise, then crumbled inward and became a pile of loose stones with no semblance to the structure its architect had envisioned.
Introduction
The Preliminary Society
During the spring of 1825 the New Harmony experiment was a subject of general discussion all over the country. The hundreds who descended on the town were a mix of freethinkers and freeloaders. On April 27, 1825, Owen addressed the community membership in the old Rappite church: “I am come to this country to introduce an entire new state of society” (Lockwood, 1905/1971, p. 83). The first address was received with enthusiasm. “He is an extraordinary man,” wrote W. Pelham to his son, “A wonderful man – such a one, indeed as the world has never before seen. His wisdom, his comprehensive mind, his practical knowledge, but above all, his openness, candor, and sincerity, have no parallel in ancient or modern history” (Lindley, 1916, p. 365). On May 1, 1825, the Preliminary Society of New Harmony was formed, and the constitution proposed by Robert Owen was adopted. The Constitution called for what Owen described as a “halfway house” to serve as a transition from the old system to the new.
The following statement preceded the Constitution of the Preliminary Society of New Harmony: The Society is instituted generally to promote the happiness of the world. The Constitution continued as follows:
This Preliminary Society is particularly formed to improve the character and conditions of its own members, and to prepare them to become associates in independent communities, having common property.
The sole objects of these communities will be to procure for all their members the greatest amount of happiness, to secure it to them, and to transmit it to their children to the latest posterity.
Persons of all ages and descriptions, exclusive of persons of color, may become members of the Preliminary Society. Persons of color may be received as helpers to the society, if necessary; or it may be found useful to prepare and enable them to become associates in communities in Africa, or in some other country, or in some other part of this country.
The members of the Preliminary Society are all of the same rank, no artificial inequality being acknowledged; precedence to be given only to age and experience, and to those who may be chosen to offices of trust and utility.
As the proprietor of the settlement, and founder of the system, has purchased the property, paid for it, and furnished the capital, and has consequently subjected himself to all the risk of the establishment, it is necessary for the formation of the system, and for its security, that he should have the appointment of the committee which is to direct and manage the affairs of the society.
This committee will conduct all the affairs of the society. It will be, as much as possible, composed of men of experience and integrity, who are competent to carry the system into effect, and to apply impartial justice to all the members of the society.
The number of the committee will be augmented from time to time, according as the proprietor may secure the assistance of other valuable members.
At the termination of one year from the establishment of the settlement, which shall be dated from the first day of May, the members of the society shall elect, by ballot, from among themselves, three additional members of the committee. Their election is for the purpose of securing to all the members a full knowledge of the proceedings of the committee, and of the business of the society; but it is delayed for one year, in order to afford time for the formation of the society, and to enable the members to become acquainted with the characters and abilities of those who are proper to be elected.
It is expected that at the termination of the second year, or between that period and the end of the third year, an association of members may be formed to constitute a community of equality and independence to be governed according to the rules and regulations contained in the printed paper entitled Mr. Owen’s Plan for the Permanent Relief of the Working Classes, with such alterations as experience may suggest and the localities of the situation may require.
The independent community will be established upon property purchased by the associated members.
The Preliminary Society will continue to receive members preparatory to their removal into other independent communities.
Every individual, previous to admission as a member, must sign the constitution, which signature shall be regularly witnessed. The members must join the society at their own expense.
The society shall not be answerable for the debts of any of its members, nor in any manner for their conduct, no partnership whatsoever existing between the members of the Preliminary Society.
The members shall occupy the dwellings which the committee may provide for them.
The live stock possessed by members will be taken and placed to their credit, if wanted for the society, but if not required, it shall not be received.
All members must provide their own household and kitchen furniture, and their small tools, such as spades, hoes, axes, rakes, etc., and they may bring such provisions as they have already provided.
All the members shall willingly render their best services for the good of the society, according to their age, experience, and capacity, and if inexperienced in that which is requisite for its welfare, they shall apply themselves diligently to acquire the knowledge of some useful occupation or employment.
They shall enter the society with a determination to promote its peace, prosperity, and harmony, and never, under any provocation whatever, act unkindly or unjustly toward, nor speak in an unfriendly manner of, any one either in or out of the society.
Members shall be temperate, regular, and orderly in their whole conduct, and they shall be diligent in their employments, in proportion to their age, capacity, and constitution.
They shall show a good example, it being a much better instructor than precept.
They shall watch over, and endeavor to protect, the whole property from every kind of injury.
The members shall receive such advantages, living, comfort, and education for their children as this society and the present state of New Harmony affords.
The living shall be upon equal terms for all, with the exceptions hereafter to be mentioned.
In old age, in sickness, or when an accident occurs, care shall be taken of all parties, medical aid shall be afforded, and every attention shown to them that kindness can suggest.
Each member shall, within a fixed amount in value, have the free choice of food and clothing; to effect this, a credit (to be hereafter fixed by the committee), will be opened in the store for each family, in proportion to the number of its useful members, also for each single member, but beyond this amount, no one will be permitted to draw on credit. The exceptions to this rule are the following, to wit:
1. When the proprietor of the establishment shall deem it necessary for the promotion of the system, and the interest and improvement of the society, to engage scientific and experienced persons to superintend some of the most difficult, useful, or responsible situations, at a fixed salary, then such individuals shall have a credit upon the store in proportion to their income.
2. When any peculiar or unforeseen case may arise, a general meeting of all the members shall be called by the committee, who shall state the particulars of the case to the meeting; the members present shall deliberate upon the subject and give their vote by ballot, and the question shall be decided by the majority.
Each family and individual member shall have a credit and debit account, in which they will be charged with what they receive, at the prices the Harmonists usually received for the same articles and credits by the value of their services, to be estimated by the committee, assisted by the persons at the head of the departments in which the respective individual be employed; the value of their services over their expenditure shall be placed at the end of each year to their credit in the books of the society, but no part of this credit shall be drawn out, except in the productions of the establishment, or in store goods, and with the consent of the committee.
Members may visit their friends, or travel whenever they please, provided the committee can conveniently supply their places in the departments in which they may be respectively employed.
To enable the members to travel, they will be supplied with funds to half the amount placed to their credit, not, however, exceeding one hundred dollars in any one year, unless the distance they have to travel from home exceeds six hundred miles.
Members may receive their friends to visit them, provided they be answerable that such visitors, during their stay, do not transgress the rules of the society.
The children will be located in the best possible manner in day-schools, and will board and sleep in their parents’ houses. Should any members, however, prefer placing their children in the boarding-school, they must make a particular and individual engagement with the committee; but no members shall be permitted to bind themselves nor their children to the society for a longer period than one week.
All the members shall enjoy complete liberty of conscience, and be afforded every facility for exercising those practices of religious worship and devotion which they may prefer.
Should the arrangements formed for the happiness of the members fail to effect their object, any of them, by giving a week’s notice, can quit the society, taking with them, in the productions of the establishment, the value of what they brought, which value shall be ascertained and fixed by the committee. The members may also, in the same manner, take out the amount of what appears to their credit in the books of the society, at the end of the year immediately preceding their removal, provided that amount still remain to their credit.
Any families or members contravening any of the articles of this constitution, or acting in any way improperly, shall be dismissed by the committee from the society and settlement, upon giving them the same notice by which they are at liberty to quit the society.
Persons who possess capital, and who do not wish to be employed, may partake of the benefits of this society, by paying such sum annually as may be agreed upon between them and the committee, always paying a quarter in advance.
Persons wishing to invest capital on interest in the funds of the society may do so by making a particular agreement with the committee. (New Harmony Gazette, 1825, Vol. 1, p. 1)
[The entire text of the Constitution is included here so the reader can begin to understand Owen’s social system and the core values of the community as they were written and expanded on during each successive revision.]
Robert Owen Returns to Scotland
After the adoption of the Constitution, Owen addressed the members and admonished them to keep the houses clean, to have a vegetable garden, and to settle all disputes with arbitration. The youth were to be formed into a militia, and drunkenness was to be prohibited. Owen remained in New Harmony for a little more than one month before returning to New Lanark in June 1825 to settle his affairs, including providing for Mrs. Owen and their two remaining daughters while their four sons, Robert Dale, William, David Dale, Richard, and one daughter, Jane Dale, followed their father to New Harmony. (By 1832, Mrs. Owen and her daughters Ann and Mary had all died within three years of each other.) The senior Owen did not return to New Harmony until Jan 12, 1826. During his seven months absence, the state of affairs in the New Harmony community continued in a state of chaos. The haphazard establishment had left little time for planting crops and organizing the populace. Several members, like Thomas Pears, saw no hope for progress until “the master spirit” returned (Pears, 1933/1973, p. 24). Within four months of Owen’s departure, many Owenites had approached their breaking points. Thomas Pears wrote to his uncle September 29, 1825 complaining about the ruling committee. He concluded his letter: “Thus you see we are living in an aristocracy, and must continue to do so until Mr. Owen returns” (p. 40). Harmonists once again looked forward to the return of Owen to right the community. They expected that under Robert Owen’s practiced hand, the community’s idle factories would soon be in full operation, and all the founder’s projected plans, including building a new village of unity and cooperation, would be undertaken. Owen had vowed to return with a boatful of the finest minds of the time, to help fulfill the promise of New Harmony.
The Boatload of Knowledge
The keelboat, The Philanthropist, subsequently dubbed the “Boatload of Knowledge” arrived on January 18, 1826. Its passengers would help cement New Harmony’s place in history (Wilson, 1964). Foremost among the new arrivals was William Maclure – scientist, social and educational reformer, and Robert Owen’s erstwhile partner. Born in Ayr, Scotland, in 1763, Maclure’s life paralleled Owen’s in several respects. Both were self-made men interested in social reform and the improvement of society, and both were willing to risk their own fortunes and reputations to prove their theories. Maclure had two passions, geology and education. One would lead to his sobriquet, “The Father of American Geology,” and the other would change the face of American education. Because of these twin passions, Maclure’s contributions, in many ways, would outshine and outlast those of Robert Owen. Maclure became an ardent advocate of the teaching methods of Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Before bringing those ideas to America, Maclure had sponsored schools based on the Pestalozzian method in France and Spain. He was so ardent about bringing this system to America that he hired French Pestalozzian teacher Joseph Neef and personally supported him for a year while Neef learned English and prepared to start a school in Philadelphia (Pitzer & Elliot, 1998, p. 85-88). Along with Neef, Maclure brought William S. Phiquepal, and Marie Duclos Fretageot to direct the Pestalozzian system of education in New Harmony. Also on the Boatload of Knowledge was naturalist, entomologist and esteemed conchologist Thomas Say. Later called “The Father of American Zoology,” Say was also curator of the American Philosophy Society and a professor of natural history at the University of Pennsylvania. Other teachers and scientists on the boat included Charles-Alexander Lesueur, French naturalist, zoologist, ichthyologist, artist and teacher; Balthazar Abernasser, a Swiss artist who taught painting at New Harmony; Virginia Dupalais, who taught art and music; and John Beal who taught carpentry in Maclure’s School of Industry.
This collection of teachers, thinkers, scientists and students also included Robert Dale Owen, Robert Owen’s son; Captain Donald Macdonald, social reformer, who had accompanied Owen on his first trip to New Harmony; and Stedman Whitwell, an English architect who made the model of Owen’s ideal village and who later had the dubious distinction of developing a universal naming system for towns and cities, a system intended to eliminate what he considered to be the annoying duplications of place names. Often assumed to have been on the Boat was Dr. Gerald Troost, preeminent chemist and geologist. However, as Troost had preceded Maclure as President of the Academie of Natural Sciences, he also preceded him to New Harmony by almost a month.
The first President of the American Geological Society, Maclure had visited Owen at New Lanark in 1824 in order to see first-hand the school about which so much had been written. Madame Fretageot, Maclure’s protégée, had become enamored of Owen and urged the joining of their combined efforts. Owen invited Maclure to become a partner in the New Harmony venture and to set up the Center for Education and Scientific Study in New Harmony. Maclure recruited all the passengers who ultimately embarked on the Boatload of Knowledge, and he instituted the Pestalozzian teaching method, which incorporated Owen’s infant schools. Maclure also purchased the keelboat that delivered the educators when the river proved too shallow for a steamboat. Maclure opened the first School of Industry in the United States and pioneered the trade school concept.
Community of Equality
Shortly after returning to New Harmony in 1826, Robert Owen was excited by what he perceived to have been accomplished in his absence, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Many, like Pears and Pelham, felt nothing had been accomplished and based all hope of success on Robert Owen’s return. Owen however, was so carried away by his own optimistic perceptions that he decided to cut off the Preliminary Society two years before it was due to expire. The purpose of the Preliminary Society had been to allow members to become converts to the system and to allow enough time to pass that members might learn to trust each other. Further, the Preliminary Society would have allowed time for those who did not fit in to leave of their own accord or be voted out. Owen perhaps moved too quickly to form the Community of Equality, but a committee of seven was chosen to draft a constitution, which was adopted on February 5, 1826. The Constitution began with this Declaration:
When a number of the human family associate in principles which do not influence the rest of the world, a due record to the opinions of others requires a public declaration of the object of their association, of their principles and their intentions. Our object is that of all sentient beings, happiness.
It was followed by the Principles:
Equality of Rights, uninfluenced by sex or condition, in all adults.
Equality of duties, modified by physical and mental conformation.
Cooperative union, in the business and amusements of life.
Community of property.
Freedom of speech and action.
Sincerity in all our proceedings.
Kindness in all our actions.
Courtesy in all our intercourse.
Order in all our arrangements.
Preservation of health.
Acquisition of knowledge.
The practice of economy, or of producing and using the best of everything in the most beneficial manner.
Obedience to the laws of the country in which we live.
We hold it to be self evident:
That man is uniformly actuated by the desire of happiness.
That no member of the human family is born with rights either of possession or exemption superior to those of his fellows.
That freedom is the sincere expression of every sentiment and opinion, and in the direction of every action, is the inalienable right of each human being, and can not be limited except by his own consent.
That the preservation of life, in its most perfect state, is the first of all practical considerations.
And that, as we live in the state of Indiana, submission to its laws and to those of
the general government is necessary.
Experience has taught us:
That man’s character, mental, moral and physical, is the result of his formation, his location, and of the circumstances within which he exists.
And that man, at birth, is formed unconsciously to himself, is located without his consent, and circumstanced without his control.
Therefore, man’s character is not of his own formation, and reason teaches us to a being of such nature, artificial rewards and punishments are equally inapplicable; kindness is the only consistent mode of treatment, and courtesy the only rational species of deportment.
We have observed, in the affairs of the world, that man is powerful in action,
efficient in production, and happy in social life, only as he acts cooperatively and
unitedly.
Cooperative union, therefore, we consider indispensable to the obtainment of our object.
We have remarked that where the greatest results have been produced by cooperative union, order and economy were the principal means of their attainment.
Experience, therefore places order and economy among our principles.
The departure from the principle of man’s equal rights, which is exhibited in the arrangement of individual property, we have seen succeeded by competition and opposition, by jealousy and dissention, by extravagance and poverty, by tyranny and slavery.
Therefore we revert to the principle of community of property.
Where the will and the power exist, the result produced is proportioned to the knowledge of the agent; and in practice we have found that an increase of intelligence is equally an increase in happiness.
We seek intelligence, therefore, as we seek happiness itself.
As the first and most important knowledge, we desire to know ourselves.
But we search for this knowledge in vain if our fellow creatures do not express to us openly and unreservedly what they feel and think.
Our knowledge remains imperfect, therefore, without sincerity.
We have seen misery produced by the great leading principles which prevail over the world; therefore we have not adopted them.
We have always found truth productive of happiness and error of misery: truth, therefore, leads to our object, and we agree to follow truth only.
Truth is consistent, and in unison with all facts: error is inconsistent, and opposed to facts.
Our reason has convinced us of the theoretical truth of our principles—our experience, of their practical utility.
For these reasons—with this object—and on these principles, we, the undersigned, form ourselves and our children into a society and Community of Equality, for the benefit of ourselves and our children and of the human race, and do agree to the following articles of union and cooperation:
All members of the community shall be considered as one family, and no one shall be held in higher or lower estimation on account of occupation. There shall be similar food, clothing, and education, as near as can be furnished, for all according to their ages; and, as soon a practicable, all shall live in similar houses, and in all respects be accommodated alike. Every member shall render his or her best services for the good of the whole, according to the rules and regulations that may be hereafter adopted by the community. It shall always remain a primary object of the community to give the best physical, moral, and intellectual education to all its members.
The power of making laws shall be vested in the assembly, consisting of all the resident members of the community above the age of twenty-one years, one-sixth of whom shall be necessary to constitute a quorum for the transaction of business. The executive power of the community shall be vested in a council, to consist of the secretary, treasurer, and commissary of the community, and four superintendents of departments to be chosen as hereinafter provided. The secretary, treasurer, and commissary shall be elected by the assembly.
The community shall be divided into six departments: Of agriculture; of manufactures and mechanics; of literature, science, and education; of domestic economy; of general economy; of commerce. These departments shall be divided into occupations. The individuals of each occupation, above sixteen years of age, shall nominate to the assembly for confirmation, their intendent, and the intendents of each occupation, which shall consist of three or more persons, shall nominate the superintendent of their own department; provided, that the commissary shall be superintendent of the department of domestic economy, and the treasurer of the department of commerce; and for the purpose of nominating superintendents the department of commerce shall be united to the department of literature, science, and education, and the department of domestic economy to that of general economy. The secretary, superintendents, and intendents shall hold their offices at the pleasure of the assembly.
The executive council shall also report weekly to the assembly all the proceedings, accounts, receipts, and expenditures of each department and occupation, and their opinion of the character of each intendent, and the intendents’ opinion of the daily character of each person attached to their occupation. All the accounts of the community shall be balanced at least once in each week, and the results communicated to the assembly. All the reports of the superintendents and of the secretary, and all the transactions of the assembly, shall be registered and carefully kept for perpetual reference. The assembly shall also register its opinion of the executive council, and the council in like manner its opinions of the proceedings of the assembly.
No person shall hereafter be admitted a member of this community without the consent of a majority of all the members of the assembly; and no person shall be dismissed from the community but by a vote of two-thirds of all the members of the assembly; and, in neither instance, until the subject shall have been discussed at two successive weekly meetings.
The real estate of the community shall be held in perpetual trust forever for the use of the community and all its members, for the time being; and every person leaving the community shall forfeit all claim thereto or interest therein, but shall be entitled to receive his or her just proportion of the value of such real estate acquired during the time of his membership, to be estimated and determined as is provided in cases of settlement for the services of members so leaving the community.
Each member shall have the right of resignation of membership on giving the community one week’s notice of his or her intention; and when any member shall so leave the community, or shall be dismissed therefrom, he shall be entitled to receive, in proper products of the community, such compensation for previous services as justice shall require, to be determined by the council, subject to an appeal to the assembly, respect being had to the gains or losses of the community during the time of his membership, as well as to the expenses of the individual and of his or her family for education or otherwise.
No credit shall, on any account, be given or received by the community or its agent or agents except for such property or money as may be advanced by Robert Owen, or William Maclure, or members of the community. Every member shall enjoy the most perfect freedom on all subjects of knowledge and opinion especially on the subject of religion. Children of deceased members shall continue to enjoy all the privileges of membership. All misunderstandings that may arise between members of the community shall be adjusted within the community.
As this system is directly opposed to secrecy and exclusion of any kind, every practical facility shall be given to strangers to enable them to become acquainted with the regulations of the community, and to examine the results which these have produced in practise [sic]; and an unreserved explanation of the views and proceedings of the community shall be communicated to the government of the country.
The constitution may be altered or amended by a vote of three-fourths of all the members of the assembly, but not until the subject has been discussed at four successive public meetings to be held in four successive weeks. (Lockwood, 1905/1971, pp. 105-109)
The new system’s provision that all members be paid equally did not allow tradespeople and professionals, whose skills the community needed, to be paid more than others, which affected recruiting efforts. Heedless of the consequences, the new Society was open to all members of the Preliminary Society who wished to sign the new Constitution. Thus, the New Harmony Community of Equality was born.
According to Robert Dale Owen, the hasty transformation from the Preliminary Society to the Community of Equality was a contributing factor to the experiment’s failure. Services of members were no longer paid in proportion to their value to the community, but equal payment was made to all members based solely on age and not by contribution. This found favor with what Robert Dale Owen called a “. . . heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists . . .” Robert Dale later regretted letting this event transpire; he wrote, “I had too much of my father’s all-believing disposition to anticipate results which any shrewd, cool-headed business man might have predicted. How rapidly they came upon us!” (Owen, R. D., 1874/1967, p. 286)
Dissension
All members of the Preliminary Society who signed the new charter within three days could become members of the Community of Equality. Captain McDonald, who had been with Owen from the beginning, and who had advised against forming the Community of Equality, left the town at this time because his views on the change had been unheeded. He wrote to the Gazette that he felt he had not been afforded the “confidence” he had hoped for by the community, and he objected to a written constitution. A group of dissidents who disagreed with the new Community of Equality on religious grounds formed their own community, which they named Macluria (although William Maclure had nothing to do with this community). These English farmers were not happy with what they perceived as Owen’s atheistic views. They kept most of the ideals and structure of the parent community, except they withdrew the right of women to vote in the assembly.
About the middle of February, 1826, Superintendents were elected to oversee the various elements of the Harmonists’ activities in the Community of Equality; these included agriculture; manufactures and mechanics; literature, science and education; general economy; and commerce. The voices of dissension grew louder. Many people were unhappy with how the elected council was running community affairs, and Robert Owen was asked to take stewardship of the community while leaving the new Constitution in force. In early March, another offshoot community formed. It took its name, Feiba Peveli, from a system invented by resident social reformer Stedman Whitwell, who developed a grid based on latitude, longitude and the alphabet. Every town was to have a totally unique name based on its actual map location. New York would be Otke Notive, while Washington would be Feili Neivul, and London would be Lafa Vovutu. Feiba Peveli was based on the parent community in philosophy while its plan of government was based more closely on that of Macluria. The governmental power of the community rested in its male members over the age of 21. The official comment was that this was what was expected to happen. The community’s official organ, the Gazette wrote, “The formation of communities is now pretty generally understood among us, and is entered upon like a matter of ordinary business. The same thing will probably occur throughout the country” (New Harmony Gazette, 1826, Vol. 1, p. 207). These communities were given property and the right to purchase said property under the following conditions:
That they should always remain communities of equality and cooperation in rights and property, and should not be divided into individual shares or separate interests
That any surplus property their industry might acquire must not be divided but used to found similar communities. And, that there should be no whiskey, or other distilled liquors made in the communities. (Lockwood, 1905/1971)
In April 1826, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar visited New Harmony. The clergy had continued to assault the social system from every pulpit, and the Duke was curious about the increasing unpopularity of Owen’s ideas in the eastern United States. He spent enough time there to realize that Owen’s perceptions differed considerably from the perceptions of the rank and file. Convinced that all was proceeding according to plan, Owen expected his experiment would reform the whole world. In contrast, almost every community member with whom the Duke talked felt he had been deceived in his expectations. The Duke also found that, contrary to the egalitarian rhetoric, social classes were not mingling but were remaining distinct. Those who considered themselves well-born, especially among the ladies, resented the common labor they were required to do. He also observed that the better educated men fraternized together but did not mingle with the others (His Highness Bernhard Duke of Weimar, 1828).
The more vocal critics came from the working classes, while the upper classes enjoyed the novelty of association with others free from the conventions of society. Robert Dale Owen wrote of his experiences,
There is a great charm in the good-fellowship and in the absence of conventionism which characterize such association. Then there was something especially taking – to me at least – in the absolute freedom from trammels, alike in expression of opinion, in dress, and in social concerns, which I found there. The evening gatherings, too, delighted me; the weekly meetings for discussion of our principles, in which I took part at once. (Owen, R. D., 1874, p.276)
For the young men of gentry, the informal access to the ladies of the community had its appeal. Robert Dale commented,
On the whole, my life in Harmony, for many months, was happy and satisfying. To this the free and simple relation there existing between youth and maiden much contributed. We called each other by our Christian names only, spoke and acted as brothers and sisters might; often strolled out by moonlight in groups, sometimes in single pairs; yet, withal, no scandal or other harm came from it . . . I met almost daily, handsome, interesting warm-hearted girls; bright, merry, and unsophisticated; charming partners at ball or picnic. (p. 276)
Mental Independence
In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, Robert Owen continued to view the community in the rosiest perspective. On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Robert Owen delivered what he called the Declaration of Mental Independence. He stated that man had been the slave to a trinity of evils: individual property, irrational systems of religion, and marriage founded on individual property. He followed with a reiteration of the principles set forth in his treatise, the New Moral World. According to Mr. Owen, making this declaration, which represented the culmination of his philosophy, was the most important event in his life. From that point on, the New Harmony Gazette was dated in the “first” and “second” years of “mental independence” (Lockwood, 1905/1971, p.147).
Sunday meetings were set aside for instruction in the new principles, and these meetings were often followed by spirited debate among the members. As members became disenchanted, other splinter groups continued to form. On July 30, 1826, the New Harmony Agricultural and Pastoral Society adopted a constitution modeled after that of previous splinter communities. This community was limited to 30 families who had to be practicing farmers to join. In spite of Owen’s continued optimism and willingness to work with any and all groups who would form under his principles, the New Harmony community slid further into discord. After losing 120 members to Macluria, and another 60 or 70 to Feiba Peveli, along with the families who had formed the Pastoral Society, the Community of Equality had only about 800 members left. “The fact that the administration organ [The Gazette] gave few particulars of the progress of the communities during the summer of 1826 is evidence that there was little to report that was favorable to the prospects of the New Harmony Experiment” (Lockwood, p.147). Squabbles broke out between the different societies, and the communities spent much time and energy wrangling with each other over boundaries and crop ownerships. Jealousy broke out among those who considered some of the societies to be aristocratic, by virtue of their membership. “We only know that numerous experiments were tried to better the condition of the communities, and that all ultimately failed. The summer was full of projects, auspiciously begun and disastrously ended” (Lockwood, p.147).
By August, Owen was exhorting members and their children to meet three evenings a week for further lessons in the Principles. William Maclure suggested in May that New Harmony be divided “into separate autonomous units according to the occupation of its members” (Wilson, 1964, p.177). Owen agreed, and the society voted itself into three separate groups, the Mechanic and Manufacture Society, the Agricultural and Pastoral Society, and the Education Society. A lease was drawn that granted to William Maclure about 900 acres of land for the Education Society, including the Hall of New Harmony, the steeple house, Community House No. 2, the Granary, and the Rapp mansion. While Maclure had been the driving force in the educational movement in New Harmony, differences were beginning to emerge between his vision and Owen’s.
Maclure vs. Owen
Owen believed he and Maclure were partners, a position Maclure did not share. Maclure believed himself to be obligated only to the society’s lease and an additional $10,000. During travels away from New Harmony for his health, Maclure wrote letters to Madame Fretageot that indicated he was losing confidence in the Owen enterprise: “My experience at New Harmony has given me such horror for the reformation of grown persons that I shudder when I reflect having so many of my friends near such a desperate undertaking” (Bestor, 1948/1973, p.377).
When Maclure returned to New Harmony in April 1827, Frederick Rapp was there to collect a $20,000 installment due on the property and to request the entire remaining balance of an additional $20,000, even though it was not due for another year. Owen agreed, and he asked Maclure to pay his partnership share of $128,000, telling him that the balance of his [Maclure’s] share of the indebtedness amounted to an additional $90,000. Maclure vehemently disputed this claim, but in the end, he agreed to pay Rapp the $40,000 in return for the bonds Rapp held against Owen, which made Maclure Owen’s creditor. Maclure posted signs around the area declaring he was not responsible for Owen’s debts, and he filed suit in the circuit court to collect the money he had paid to Rapp. Caught by surprise, Owen posted his own notices declaring the partnership to be in full force, and then he, too, filed suit in the amount of $90,000. Arbitration led to a compromise wherein Maclure paid Owen $5,000, and Owen gave Maclure an unrestricted deed to the 490 acres operated by the Education Society for an additional $44,000.
Owen had said he would sell land to anyone willing to live by his principles, and more of the property began to fall into private hands as he sold parcels of land to those who promised to continue the experiment. According to Paul Brown (1827/1972), the resident dissident who exposed the shortcomings of Owen and his views in his pamphlet, “Twelve Months in New Harmony,” the community was in a state of disarray with fences torn down, animals roaming loose and tempers flaring everywhere, including a fist fight among the women. Owen was swindled by William Taylor who pretended to be a disciple in order to obtain 1500 acres “with all thereon.” The night before the contract went into effect, Taylor moved all the livestock and equipment he could find onto the property. He then set up a distillery against Mr. Owen’s wishes and a tannery to directly compete with the one in New Harmony (Brown, 1827/1972).
On February 1, which Paul Brown called “Doomsday,” a vote of the assembly expelled many members of the Community of Equality. Some of the remaining dissidents planned to hold a mock funeral to lay to rest the failed social system, but their plans were thwarted by unknown persons who broke in and destroyed the coffin, which was to have been used for the event. On March 28, 1827, a Gazette editorial written by Robert Dale and William Owen acknowledged the defeat of the experiment, while still affirming the principles of the general plan: “Our opinion is that Robert Owen ascribed too little influence to the early anti-social circumstances that surrounded many of the quickly collected inhabitants. . . . New Harmony, therefore is not now a community” (Owen, R. D., 1874/1967, p. 289). Writing in his autobiography, Robert Dale Owen closed the chapter on New Harmony:
Thenceforth, of course, the inhabitants had to either support themselves or leave town. But my father offered land on the Harmony estate to those who desired to try smaller community experiments, on an agricultural basis. Several were formed, some by honest, industrious workers, to whom land was leased at very low rates; while other leases were obtained by unprincipled speculators who cared not a whit for co-operative principles, but sought private gain by the operation. All finally failed as social experiments. (Owen R. D., 1874/1967, p. 289)
Conclusion
This brief history of the Owenite experiment provided an overview of the diverse forces and influences that drove events in the short-lived community of New Harmony. The next chapter contains a narrative history of the community’s newspaper, the New Harmony Gazette.
I’m sitting on a bench outside the Rapp mansion in New Harmony, Indiana. The air is fragrant with the scent of roses and lavender. Across the yard, past the burial mound of Thomas Say, I can see the old Harmonist granary, which was totally rebuilt and restored by Kenneth Dale Owen, the last surviving direct descendent of the Owen family. After a fire in 1878 destroyed the roof and top two floors, the stone walls of the first floor gradually piled in on each other, not unlike the community of New Harmony itself under Robert Owen, which started out with so much promise, then crumbled inward and became a pile of loose stones with no semblance to the structure its architect had envisioned.
Introduction
The Preliminary Society
During the spring of 1825 the New Harmony experiment was a subject of general discussion all over the country. The hundreds who descended on the town were a mix of freethinkers and freeloaders. On April 27, 1825, Owen addressed the community membership in the old Rappite church: “I am come to this country to introduce an entire new state of society” (Lockwood, 1905/1971, p. 83). The first address was received with enthusiasm. “He is an extraordinary man,” wrote W. Pelham to his son, “A wonderful man – such a one, indeed as the world has never before seen. His wisdom, his comprehensive mind, his practical knowledge, but above all, his openness, candor, and sincerity, have no parallel in ancient or modern history” (Lindley, 1916, p. 365). On May 1, 1825, the Preliminary Society of New Harmony was formed, and the constitution proposed by Robert Owen was adopted. The Constitution called for what Owen described as a “halfway house” to serve as a transition from the old system to the new.
The following statement preceded the Constitution of the Preliminary Society of New Harmony: The Society is instituted generally to promote the happiness of the world. The Constitution continued as follows:
This Preliminary Society is particularly formed to improve the character and conditions of its own members, and to prepare them to become associates in independent communities, having common property.
The sole objects of these communities will be to procure for all their members the greatest amount of happiness, to secure it to them, and to transmit it to their children to the latest posterity.
Persons of all ages and descriptions, exclusive of persons of color, may become members of the Preliminary Society. Persons of color may be received as helpers to the society, if necessary; or it may be found useful to prepare and enable them to become associates in communities in Africa, or in some other country, or in some other part of this country.
The members of the Preliminary Society are all of the same rank, no artificial inequality being acknowledged; precedence to be given only to age and experience, and to those who may be chosen to offices of trust and utility.
As the proprietor of the settlement, and founder of the system, has purchased the property, paid for it, and furnished the capital, and has consequently subjected himself to all the risk of the establishment, it is necessary for the formation of the system, and for its security, that he should have the appointment of the committee which is to direct and manage the affairs of the society.
This committee will conduct all the affairs of the society. It will be, as much as possible, composed of men of experience and integrity, who are competent to carry the system into effect, and to apply impartial justice to all the members of the society.
The number of the committee will be augmented from time to time, according as the proprietor may secure the assistance of other valuable members.
At the termination of one year from the establishment of the settlement, which shall be dated from the first day of May, the members of the society shall elect, by ballot, from among themselves, three additional members of the committee. Their election is for the purpose of securing to all the members a full knowledge of the proceedings of the committee, and of the business of the society; but it is delayed for one year, in order to afford time for the formation of the society, and to enable the members to become acquainted with the characters and abilities of those who are proper to be elected.
It is expected that at the termination of the second year, or between that period and the end of the third year, an association of members may be formed to constitute a community of equality and independence to be governed according to the rules and regulations contained in the printed paper entitled Mr. Owen’s Plan for the Permanent Relief of the Working Classes, with such alterations as experience may suggest and the localities of the situation may require.
The independent community will be established upon property purchased by the associated members.
The Preliminary Society will continue to receive members preparatory to their removal into other independent communities.
Every individual, previous to admission as a member, must sign the constitution, which signature shall be regularly witnessed. The members must join the society at their own expense.
The society shall not be answerable for the debts of any of its members, nor in any manner for their conduct, no partnership whatsoever existing between the members of the Preliminary Society.
The members shall occupy the dwellings which the committee may provide for them.
The live stock possessed by members will be taken and placed to their credit, if wanted for the society, but if not required, it shall not be received.
All members must provide their own household and kitchen furniture, and their small tools, such as spades, hoes, axes, rakes, etc., and they may bring such provisions as they have already provided.
All the members shall willingly render their best services for the good of the society, according to their age, experience, and capacity, and if inexperienced in that which is requisite for its welfare, they shall apply themselves diligently to acquire the knowledge of some useful occupation or employment.
They shall enter the society with a determination to promote its peace, prosperity, and harmony, and never, under any provocation whatever, act unkindly or unjustly toward, nor speak in an unfriendly manner of, any one either in or out of the society.
Members shall be temperate, regular, and orderly in their whole conduct, and they shall be diligent in their employments, in proportion to their age, capacity, and constitution.
They shall show a good example, it being a much better instructor than precept.
They shall watch over, and endeavor to protect, the whole property from every kind of injury.
The members shall receive such advantages, living, comfort, and education for their children as this society and the present state of New Harmony affords.
The living shall be upon equal terms for all, with the exceptions hereafter to be mentioned.
In old age, in sickness, or when an accident occurs, care shall be taken of all parties, medical aid shall be afforded, and every attention shown to them that kindness can suggest.
Each member shall, within a fixed amount in value, have the free choice of food and clothing; to effect this, a credit (to be hereafter fixed by the committee), will be opened in the store for each family, in proportion to the number of its useful members, also for each single member, but beyond this amount, no one will be permitted to draw on credit. The exceptions to this rule are the following, to wit:
1. When the proprietor of the establishment shall deem it necessary for the promotion of the system, and the interest and improvement of the society, to engage scientific and experienced persons to superintend some of the most difficult, useful, or responsible situations, at a fixed salary, then such individuals shall have a credit upon the store in proportion to their income.
2. When any peculiar or unforeseen case may arise, a general meeting of all the members shall be called by the committee, who shall state the particulars of the case to the meeting; the members present shall deliberate upon the subject and give their vote by ballot, and the question shall be decided by the majority.
Each family and individual member shall have a credit and debit account, in which they will be charged with what they receive, at the prices the Harmonists usually received for the same articles and credits by the value of their services, to be estimated by the committee, assisted by the persons at the head of the departments in which the respective individual be employed; the value of their services over their expenditure shall be placed at the end of each year to their credit in the books of the society, but no part of this credit shall be drawn out, except in the productions of the establishment, or in store goods, and with the consent of the committee.
Members may visit their friends, or travel whenever they please, provided the committee can conveniently supply their places in the departments in which they may be respectively employed.
To enable the members to travel, they will be supplied with funds to half the amount placed to their credit, not, however, exceeding one hundred dollars in any one year, unless the distance they have to travel from home exceeds six hundred miles.
Members may receive their friends to visit them, provided they be answerable that such visitors, during their stay, do not transgress the rules of the society.
The children will be located in the best possible manner in day-schools, and will board and sleep in their parents’ houses. Should any members, however, prefer placing their children in the boarding-school, they must make a particular and individual engagement with the committee; but no members shall be permitted to bind themselves nor their children to the society for a longer period than one week.
All the members shall enjoy complete liberty of conscience, and be afforded every facility for exercising those practices of religious worship and devotion which they may prefer.
Should the arrangements formed for the happiness of the members fail to effect their object, any of them, by giving a week’s notice, can quit the society, taking with them, in the productions of the establishment, the value of what they brought, which value shall be ascertained and fixed by the committee. The members may also, in the same manner, take out the amount of what appears to their credit in the books of the society, at the end of the year immediately preceding their removal, provided that amount still remain to their credit.
Any families or members contravening any of the articles of this constitution, or acting in any way improperly, shall be dismissed by the committee from the society and settlement, upon giving them the same notice by which they are at liberty to quit the society.
Persons who possess capital, and who do not wish to be employed, may partake of the benefits of this society, by paying such sum annually as may be agreed upon between them and the committee, always paying a quarter in advance.
Persons wishing to invest capital on interest in the funds of the society may do so by making a particular agreement with the committee. (New Harmony Gazette, 1825, Vol. 1, p. 1)
[The entire text of the Constitution is included here so the reader can begin to understand Owen’s social system and the core values of the community as they were written and expanded on during each successive revision.]
Robert Owen Returns to Scotland
After the adoption of the Constitution, Owen addressed the members and admonished them to keep the houses clean, to have a vegetable garden, and to settle all disputes with arbitration. The youth were to be formed into a militia, and drunkenness was to be prohibited. Owen remained in New Harmony for a little more than one month before returning to New Lanark in June 1825 to settle his affairs, including providing for Mrs. Owen and their two remaining daughters while their four sons, Robert Dale, William, David Dale, Richard, and one daughter, Jane Dale, followed their father to New Harmony. (By 1832, Mrs. Owen and her daughters Ann and Mary had all died within three years of each other.) The senior Owen did not return to New Harmony until Jan 12, 1826. During his seven months absence, the state of affairs in the New Harmony community continued in a state of chaos. The haphazard establishment had left little time for planting crops and organizing the populace. Several members, like Thomas Pears, saw no hope for progress until “the master spirit” returned (Pears, 1933/1973, p. 24). Within four months of Owen’s departure, many Owenites had approached their breaking points. Thomas Pears wrote to his uncle September 29, 1825 complaining about the ruling committee. He concluded his letter: “Thus you see we are living in an aristocracy, and must continue to do so until Mr. Owen returns” (p. 40). Harmonists once again looked forward to the return of Owen to right the community. They expected that under Robert Owen’s practiced hand, the community’s idle factories would soon be in full operation, and all the founder’s projected plans, including building a new village of unity and cooperation, would be undertaken. Owen had vowed to return with a boatful of the finest minds of the time, to help fulfill the promise of New Harmony.
The Boatload of Knowledge
The keelboat, The Philanthropist, subsequently dubbed the “Boatload of Knowledge” arrived on January 18, 1826. Its passengers would help cement New Harmony’s place in history (Wilson, 1964). Foremost among the new arrivals was William Maclure – scientist, social and educational reformer, and Robert Owen’s erstwhile partner. Born in Ayr, Scotland, in 1763, Maclure’s life paralleled Owen’s in several respects. Both were self-made men interested in social reform and the improvement of society, and both were willing to risk their own fortunes and reputations to prove their theories. Maclure had two passions, geology and education. One would lead to his sobriquet, “The Father of American Geology,” and the other would change the face of American education. Because of these twin passions, Maclure’s contributions, in many ways, would outshine and outlast those of Robert Owen. Maclure became an ardent advocate of the teaching methods of Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Before bringing those ideas to America, Maclure had sponsored schools based on the Pestalozzian method in France and Spain. He was so ardent about bringing this system to America that he hired French Pestalozzian teacher Joseph Neef and personally supported him for a year while Neef learned English and prepared to start a school in Philadelphia (Pitzer & Elliot, 1998, p. 85-88). Along with Neef, Maclure brought William S. Phiquepal, and Marie Duclos Fretageot to direct the Pestalozzian system of education in New Harmony. Also on the Boatload of Knowledge was naturalist, entomologist and esteemed conchologist Thomas Say. Later called “The Father of American Zoology,” Say was also curator of the American Philosophy Society and a professor of natural history at the University of Pennsylvania. Other teachers and scientists on the boat included Charles-Alexander Lesueur, French naturalist, zoologist, ichthyologist, artist and teacher; Balthazar Abernasser, a Swiss artist who taught painting at New Harmony; Virginia Dupalais, who taught art and music; and John Beal who taught carpentry in Maclure’s School of Industry.
This collection of teachers, thinkers, scientists and students also included Robert Dale Owen, Robert Owen’s son; Captain Donald Macdonald, social reformer, who had accompanied Owen on his first trip to New Harmony; and Stedman Whitwell, an English architect who made the model of Owen’s ideal village and who later had the dubious distinction of developing a universal naming system for towns and cities, a system intended to eliminate what he considered to be the annoying duplications of place names. Often assumed to have been on the Boat was Dr. Gerald Troost, preeminent chemist and geologist. However, as Troost had preceded Maclure as President of the Academie of Natural Sciences, he also preceded him to New Harmony by almost a month.
The first President of the American Geological Society, Maclure had visited Owen at New Lanark in 1824 in order to see first-hand the school about which so much had been written. Madame Fretageot, Maclure’s protégée, had become enamored of Owen and urged the joining of their combined efforts. Owen invited Maclure to become a partner in the New Harmony venture and to set up the Center for Education and Scientific Study in New Harmony. Maclure recruited all the passengers who ultimately embarked on the Boatload of Knowledge, and he instituted the Pestalozzian teaching method, which incorporated Owen’s infant schools. Maclure also purchased the keelboat that delivered the educators when the river proved too shallow for a steamboat. Maclure opened the first School of Industry in the United States and pioneered the trade school concept.
Community of Equality
Shortly after returning to New Harmony in 1826, Robert Owen was excited by what he perceived to have been accomplished in his absence, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Many, like Pears and Pelham, felt nothing had been accomplished and based all hope of success on Robert Owen’s return. Owen however, was so carried away by his own optimistic perceptions that he decided to cut off the Preliminary Society two years before it was due to expire. The purpose of the Preliminary Society had been to allow members to become converts to the system and to allow enough time to pass that members might learn to trust each other. Further, the Preliminary Society would have allowed time for those who did not fit in to leave of their own accord or be voted out. Owen perhaps moved too quickly to form the Community of Equality, but a committee of seven was chosen to draft a constitution, which was adopted on February 5, 1826. The Constitution began with this Declaration:
When a number of the human family associate in principles which do not influence the rest of the world, a due record to the opinions of others requires a public declaration of the object of their association, of their principles and their intentions. Our object is that of all sentient beings, happiness.
It was followed by the Principles:
Equality of Rights, uninfluenced by sex or condition, in all adults.
Equality of duties, modified by physical and mental conformation.
Cooperative union, in the business and amusements of life.
Community of property.
Freedom of speech and action.
Sincerity in all our proceedings.
Kindness in all our actions.
Courtesy in all our intercourse.
Order in all our arrangements.
Preservation of health.
Acquisition of knowledge.
The practice of economy, or of producing and using the best of everything in the most beneficial manner.
Obedience to the laws of the country in which we live.
We hold it to be self evident:
That man is uniformly actuated by the desire of happiness.
That no member of the human family is born with rights either of possession or exemption superior to those of his fellows.
That freedom is the sincere expression of every sentiment and opinion, and in the direction of every action, is the inalienable right of each human being, and can not be limited except by his own consent.
That the preservation of life, in its most perfect state, is the first of all practical considerations.
And that, as we live in the state of Indiana, submission to its laws and to those of
the general government is necessary.
Experience has taught us:
That man’s character, mental, moral and physical, is the result of his formation, his location, and of the circumstances within which he exists.
And that man, at birth, is formed unconsciously to himself, is located without his consent, and circumstanced without his control.
Therefore, man’s character is not of his own formation, and reason teaches us to a being of such nature, artificial rewards and punishments are equally inapplicable; kindness is the only consistent mode of treatment, and courtesy the only rational species of deportment.
We have observed, in the affairs of the world, that man is powerful in action,
efficient in production, and happy in social life, only as he acts cooperatively and
unitedly.
Cooperative union, therefore, we consider indispensable to the obtainment of our object.
We have remarked that where the greatest results have been produced by cooperative union, order and economy were the principal means of their attainment.
Experience, therefore places order and economy among our principles.
The departure from the principle of man’s equal rights, which is exhibited in the arrangement of individual property, we have seen succeeded by competition and opposition, by jealousy and dissention, by extravagance and poverty, by tyranny and slavery.
Therefore we revert to the principle of community of property.
Where the will and the power exist, the result produced is proportioned to the knowledge of the agent; and in practice we have found that an increase of intelligence is equally an increase in happiness.
We seek intelligence, therefore, as we seek happiness itself.
As the first and most important knowledge, we desire to know ourselves.
But we search for this knowledge in vain if our fellow creatures do not express to us openly and unreservedly what they feel and think.
Our knowledge remains imperfect, therefore, without sincerity.
We have seen misery produced by the great leading principles which prevail over the world; therefore we have not adopted them.
We have always found truth productive of happiness and error of misery: truth, therefore, leads to our object, and we agree to follow truth only.
Truth is consistent, and in unison with all facts: error is inconsistent, and opposed to facts.
Our reason has convinced us of the theoretical truth of our principles—our experience, of their practical utility.
For these reasons—with this object—and on these principles, we, the undersigned, form ourselves and our children into a society and Community of Equality, for the benefit of ourselves and our children and of the human race, and do agree to the following articles of union and cooperation:
All members of the community shall be considered as one family, and no one shall be held in higher or lower estimation on account of occupation. There shall be similar food, clothing, and education, as near as can be furnished, for all according to their ages; and, as soon a practicable, all shall live in similar houses, and in all respects be accommodated alike. Every member shall render his or her best services for the good of the whole, according to the rules and regulations that may be hereafter adopted by the community. It shall always remain a primary object of the community to give the best physical, moral, and intellectual education to all its members.
The power of making laws shall be vested in the assembly, consisting of all the resident members of the community above the age of twenty-one years, one-sixth of whom shall be necessary to constitute a quorum for the transaction of business. The executive power of the community shall be vested in a council, to consist of the secretary, treasurer, and commissary of the community, and four superintendents of departments to be chosen as hereinafter provided. The secretary, treasurer, and commissary shall be elected by the assembly.
The community shall be divided into six departments: Of agriculture; of manufactures and mechanics; of literature, science, and education; of domestic economy; of general economy; of commerce. These departments shall be divided into occupations. The individuals of each occupation, above sixteen years of age, shall nominate to the assembly for confirmation, their intendent, and the intendents of each occupation, which shall consist of three or more persons, shall nominate the superintendent of their own department; provided, that the commissary shall be superintendent of the department of domestic economy, and the treasurer of the department of commerce; and for the purpose of nominating superintendents the department of commerce shall be united to the department of literature, science, and education, and the department of domestic economy to that of general economy. The secretary, superintendents, and intendents shall hold their offices at the pleasure of the assembly.
The executive council shall also report weekly to the assembly all the proceedings, accounts, receipts, and expenditures of each department and occupation, and their opinion of the character of each intendent, and the intendents’ opinion of the daily character of each person attached to their occupation. All the accounts of the community shall be balanced at least once in each week, and the results communicated to the assembly. All the reports of the superintendents and of the secretary, and all the transactions of the assembly, shall be registered and carefully kept for perpetual reference. The assembly shall also register its opinion of the executive council, and the council in like manner its opinions of the proceedings of the assembly.
No person shall hereafter be admitted a member of this community without the consent of a majority of all the members of the assembly; and no person shall be dismissed from the community but by a vote of two-thirds of all the members of the assembly; and, in neither instance, until the subject shall have been discussed at two successive weekly meetings.
The real estate of the community shall be held in perpetual trust forever for the use of the community and all its members, for the time being; and every person leaving the community shall forfeit all claim thereto or interest therein, but shall be entitled to receive his or her just proportion of the value of such real estate acquired during the time of his membership, to be estimated and determined as is provided in cases of settlement for the services of members so leaving the community.
Each member shall have the right of resignation of membership on giving the community one week’s notice of his or her intention; and when any member shall so leave the community, or shall be dismissed therefrom, he shall be entitled to receive, in proper products of the community, such compensation for previous services as justice shall require, to be determined by the council, subject to an appeal to the assembly, respect being had to the gains or losses of the community during the time of his membership, as well as to the expenses of the individual and of his or her family for education or otherwise.
No credit shall, on any account, be given or received by the community or its agent or agents except for such property or money as may be advanced by Robert Owen, or William Maclure, or members of the community. Every member shall enjoy the most perfect freedom on all subjects of knowledge and opinion especially on the subject of religion. Children of deceased members shall continue to enjoy all the privileges of membership. All misunderstandings that may arise between members of the community shall be adjusted within the community.
As this system is directly opposed to secrecy and exclusion of any kind, every practical facility shall be given to strangers to enable them to become acquainted with the regulations of the community, and to examine the results which these have produced in practise [sic]; and an unreserved explanation of the views and proceedings of the community shall be communicated to the government of the country.
The constitution may be altered or amended by a vote of three-fourths of all the members of the assembly, but not until the subject has been discussed at four successive public meetings to be held in four successive weeks. (Lockwood, 1905/1971, pp. 105-109)
The new system’s provision that all members be paid equally did not allow tradespeople and professionals, whose skills the community needed, to be paid more than others, which affected recruiting efforts. Heedless of the consequences, the new Society was open to all members of the Preliminary Society who wished to sign the new Constitution. Thus, the New Harmony Community of Equality was born.
According to Robert Dale Owen, the hasty transformation from the Preliminary Society to the Community of Equality was a contributing factor to the experiment’s failure. Services of members were no longer paid in proportion to their value to the community, but equal payment was made to all members based solely on age and not by contribution. This found favor with what Robert Dale Owen called a “. . . heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists . . .” Robert Dale later regretted letting this event transpire; he wrote, “I had too much of my father’s all-believing disposition to anticipate results which any shrewd, cool-headed business man might have predicted. How rapidly they came upon us!” (Owen, R. D., 1874/1967, p. 286)
Dissension
All members of the Preliminary Society who signed the new charter within three days could become members of the Community of Equality. Captain McDonald, who had been with Owen from the beginning, and who had advised against forming the Community of Equality, left the town at this time because his views on the change had been unheeded. He wrote to the Gazette that he felt he had not been afforded the “confidence” he had hoped for by the community, and he objected to a written constitution. A group of dissidents who disagreed with the new Community of Equality on religious grounds formed their own community, which they named Macluria (although William Maclure had nothing to do with this community). These English farmers were not happy with what they perceived as Owen’s atheistic views. They kept most of the ideals and structure of the parent community, except they withdrew the right of women to vote in the assembly.
About the middle of February, 1826, Superintendents were elected to oversee the various elements of the Harmonists’ activities in the Community of Equality; these included agriculture; manufactures and mechanics; literature, science and education; general economy; and commerce. The voices of dissension grew louder. Many people were unhappy with how the elected council was running community affairs, and Robert Owen was asked to take stewardship of the community while leaving the new Constitution in force. In early March, another offshoot community formed. It took its name, Feiba Peveli, from a system invented by resident social reformer Stedman Whitwell, who developed a grid based on latitude, longitude and the alphabet. Every town was to have a totally unique name based on its actual map location. New York would be Otke Notive, while Washington would be Feili Neivul, and London would be Lafa Vovutu. Feiba Peveli was based on the parent community in philosophy while its plan of government was based more closely on that of Macluria. The governmental power of the community rested in its male members over the age of 21. The official comment was that this was what was expected to happen. The community’s official organ, the Gazette wrote, “The formation of communities is now pretty generally understood among us, and is entered upon like a matter of ordinary business. The same thing will probably occur throughout the country” (New Harmony Gazette, 1826, Vol. 1, p. 207). These communities were given property and the right to purchase said property under the following conditions:
That they should always remain communities of equality and cooperation in rights and property, and should not be divided into individual shares or separate interests
That any surplus property their industry might acquire must not be divided but used to found similar communities. And, that there should be no whiskey, or other distilled liquors made in the communities. (Lockwood, 1905/1971)
In April 1826, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar visited New Harmony. The clergy had continued to assault the social system from every pulpit, and the Duke was curious about the increasing unpopularity of Owen’s ideas in the eastern United States. He spent enough time there to realize that Owen’s perceptions differed considerably from the perceptions of the rank and file. Convinced that all was proceeding according to plan, Owen expected his experiment would reform the whole world. In contrast, almost every community member with whom the Duke talked felt he had been deceived in his expectations. The Duke also found that, contrary to the egalitarian rhetoric, social classes were not mingling but were remaining distinct. Those who considered themselves well-born, especially among the ladies, resented the common labor they were required to do. He also observed that the better educated men fraternized together but did not mingle with the others (His Highness Bernhard Duke of Weimar, 1828).
The more vocal critics came from the working classes, while the upper classes enjoyed the novelty of association with others free from the conventions of society. Robert Dale Owen wrote of his experiences,
There is a great charm in the good-fellowship and in the absence of conventionism which characterize such association. Then there was something especially taking – to me at least – in the absolute freedom from trammels, alike in expression of opinion, in dress, and in social concerns, which I found there. The evening gatherings, too, delighted me; the weekly meetings for discussion of our principles, in which I took part at once. (Owen, R. D., 1874, p.276)
For the young men of gentry, the informal access to the ladies of the community had its appeal. Robert Dale commented,
On the whole, my life in Harmony, for many months, was happy and satisfying. To this the free and simple relation there existing between youth and maiden much contributed. We called each other by our Christian names only, spoke and acted as brothers and sisters might; often strolled out by moonlight in groups, sometimes in single pairs; yet, withal, no scandal or other harm came from it . . . I met almost daily, handsome, interesting warm-hearted girls; bright, merry, and unsophisticated; charming partners at ball or picnic. (p. 276)
Mental Independence
In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, Robert Owen continued to view the community in the rosiest perspective. On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Robert Owen delivered what he called the Declaration of Mental Independence. He stated that man had been the slave to a trinity of evils: individual property, irrational systems of religion, and marriage founded on individual property. He followed with a reiteration of the principles set forth in his treatise, the New Moral World. According to Mr. Owen, making this declaration, which represented the culmination of his philosophy, was the most important event in his life. From that point on, the New Harmony Gazette was dated in the “first” and “second” years of “mental independence” (Lockwood, 1905/1971, p.147).
Sunday meetings were set aside for instruction in the new principles, and these meetings were often followed by spirited debate among the members. As members became disenchanted, other splinter groups continued to form. On July 30, 1826, the New Harmony Agricultural and Pastoral Society adopted a constitution modeled after that of previous splinter communities. This community was limited to 30 families who had to be practicing farmers to join. In spite of Owen’s continued optimism and willingness to work with any and all groups who would form under his principles, the New Harmony community slid further into discord. After losing 120 members to Macluria, and another 60 or 70 to Feiba Peveli, along with the families who had formed the Pastoral Society, the Community of Equality had only about 800 members left. “The fact that the administration organ [The Gazette] gave few particulars of the progress of the communities during the summer of 1826 is evidence that there was little to report that was favorable to the prospects of the New Harmony Experiment” (Lockwood, p.147). Squabbles broke out between the different societies, and the communities spent much time and energy wrangling with each other over boundaries and crop ownerships. Jealousy broke out among those who considered some of the societies to be aristocratic, by virtue of their membership. “We only know that numerous experiments were tried to better the condition of the communities, and that all ultimately failed. The summer was full of projects, auspiciously begun and disastrously ended” (Lockwood, p.147).
By August, Owen was exhorting members and their children to meet three evenings a week for further lessons in the Principles. William Maclure suggested in May that New Harmony be divided “into separate autonomous units according to the occupation of its members” (Wilson, 1964, p.177). Owen agreed, and the society voted itself into three separate groups, the Mechanic and Manufacture Society, the Agricultural and Pastoral Society, and the Education Society. A lease was drawn that granted to William Maclure about 900 acres of land for the Education Society, including the Hall of New Harmony, the steeple house, Community House No. 2, the Granary, and the Rapp mansion. While Maclure had been the driving force in the educational movement in New Harmony, differences were beginning to emerge between his vision and Owen’s.
Maclure vs. Owen
Owen believed he and Maclure were partners, a position Maclure did not share. Maclure believed himself to be obligated only to the society’s lease and an additional $10,000. During travels away from New Harmony for his health, Maclure wrote letters to Madame Fretageot that indicated he was losing confidence in the Owen enterprise: “My experience at New Harmony has given me such horror for the reformation of grown persons that I shudder when I reflect having so many of my friends near such a desperate undertaking” (Bestor, 1948/1973, p.377).
When Maclure returned to New Harmony in April 1827, Frederick Rapp was there to collect a $20,000 installment due on the property and to request the entire remaining balance of an additional $20,000, even though it was not due for another year. Owen agreed, and he asked Maclure to pay his partnership share of $128,000, telling him that the balance of his [Maclure’s] share of the indebtedness amounted to an additional $90,000. Maclure vehemently disputed this claim, but in the end, he agreed to pay Rapp the $40,000 in return for the bonds Rapp held against Owen, which made Maclure Owen’s creditor. Maclure posted signs around the area declaring he was not responsible for Owen’s debts, and he filed suit in the circuit court to collect the money he had paid to Rapp. Caught by surprise, Owen posted his own notices declaring the partnership to be in full force, and then he, too, filed suit in the amount of $90,000. Arbitration led to a compromise wherein Maclure paid Owen $5,000, and Owen gave Maclure an unrestricted deed to the 490 acres operated by the Education Society for an additional $44,000.
Owen had said he would sell land to anyone willing to live by his principles, and more of the property began to fall into private hands as he sold parcels of land to those who promised to continue the experiment. According to Paul Brown (1827/1972), the resident dissident who exposed the shortcomings of Owen and his views in his pamphlet, “Twelve Months in New Harmony,” the community was in a state of disarray with fences torn down, animals roaming loose and tempers flaring everywhere, including a fist fight among the women. Owen was swindled by William Taylor who pretended to be a disciple in order to obtain 1500 acres “with all thereon.” The night before the contract went into effect, Taylor moved all the livestock and equipment he could find onto the property. He then set up a distillery against Mr. Owen’s wishes and a tannery to directly compete with the one in New Harmony (Brown, 1827/1972).
On February 1, which Paul Brown called “Doomsday,” a vote of the assembly expelled many members of the Community of Equality. Some of the remaining dissidents planned to hold a mock funeral to lay to rest the failed social system, but their plans were thwarted by unknown persons who broke in and destroyed the coffin, which was to have been used for the event. On March 28, 1827, a Gazette editorial written by Robert Dale and William Owen acknowledged the defeat of the experiment, while still affirming the principles of the general plan: “Our opinion is that Robert Owen ascribed too little influence to the early anti-social circumstances that surrounded many of the quickly collected inhabitants. . . . New Harmony, therefore is not now a community” (Owen, R. D., 1874/1967, p. 289). Writing in his autobiography, Robert Dale Owen closed the chapter on New Harmony:
Thenceforth, of course, the inhabitants had to either support themselves or leave town. But my father offered land on the Harmony estate to those who desired to try smaller community experiments, on an agricultural basis. Several were formed, some by honest, industrious workers, to whom land was leased at very low rates; while other leases were obtained by unprincipled speculators who cared not a whit for co-operative principles, but sought private gain by the operation. All finally failed as social experiments. (Owen R. D., 1874/1967, p. 289)
Conclusion
This brief history of the Owenite experiment provided an overview of the diverse forces and influences that drove events in the short-lived community of New Harmony. The next chapter contains a narrative history of the community’s newspaper, the New Harmony Gazette.
Chapter 2: The history of Robert Owen
Chapter Two: The Historical Setting
The heat is stultifying, oppressive. I am sitting under the triple canopy hardwood forest of the Ohio River basin, and the sweat is running along my sides and down my temples in rivulets. Muggy is a word that comes to mind. Muggy is a word from childhood that my aunts would use to describe a warm, moist day, an uncomfortably damp day. This is way beyond muggy; this is hot, furnace hot. This is Vietnam hot.
Above New Harmony, Indiana, everything is green, almost painfully green. On the slopes above the wide, shallow, fast water of the Wabash River, the white and red oak, the exotic sassafras, the papaw, and the Eastern redbud mingle with the flowering dogwood, the persimmon, and the pecan trees. The shadows grow long, and the cicadas burst forth with their high-pitched chatter. The dark rises from the ground and fills the gaps between the shadows. Suddenly, the dark is broken by a tiny but intense burst of light, then another, and another. My God, fireflies! Hundreds of them. Little insect supernovas. I have never before seen a firefly. I am transfixed and watch them for half an hour without moving.
I begin to realize that these fireflies are not unlike the utopian society I have come to study here at the New Harmony site. Robert Owen and his intrepid band were cultural fireflies that lit up for one brief moment with the promise of a better way of living for mankind, and here I am, 170 years later, chasing that speck of light trying to understand what they sought to illuminate.
Introduction
The following chapter sets the time and place of this study. It introduces the reader to the geography and brief history of the area where the New Harmony community was established. It also provides a biographical sketch of Robert Owen, as well as some acknowledgement of the social and political forces that were in play at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A history of the Owenite community is then explored, that introduces the major historical figures and the events that transpired between the founding and the dissolution of the community.
The Setting
The area of southwestern Indiana called the “pocket” lies between the confluence of the Wabash and the Ohio Rivers. In ancient times, before White settlers came, the area was inhabited by the central Algonquin tribes – the Potowatomies, the Weas, and the Piankershaws. These tribes, by the 17th century, had formed the Miami Confederation in order to defend their tribal lands against encroachment by the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. “By the time the first European settlers came into the area, the tribes were weakened by defeats in war and in the disruptions to their traditional life” (Access Indiana, 2000, p. 2).
During the 1700s the French made claim to the great American Northwest and, in 1750, they built a fort at the mouth of the Wabash. England took possession of the area after France’s defeat in the French and Indian War. The area now known as Indiana was a county of Virginia before the formation of the Northwest Territory. The first settlers began to trickle in sometime between 1790 and 1800. Thomas Jones is credited with building the first cabin in the area, followed by Samuel Black, Nathaniel Miller, William and Isaac James, George Henchat, and Peter Roach, who established a trading post on the Wabash to cater to the flatboat business (Access Indiana, 2000, p. 2).
In 1814, by act of the Territorial Legislature, the forestland located at the juncture of the Till Plains and the Southern Hills became Posey County, named in honor of Tomas Posey who was an officer in the French and Indian, and the Revolutionary Wars. Posey was also the sitting governor of the Indiana Territory at the time. It was during this period that large-scale settlement of the area began. In June, 1814, the town of Harmonie was established on the Wabash by the German Pietist George Rapp and his followers.
Social and political turmoil of the times gave rise to many social experiments. In Europe the bloody French Revolution had dissolved into the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. France and England had been fighting for 20 years; in the Americas, the fledgling United States—the ink just dry on its Constitution—was struggling for direction and unity while trying to avoid getting drawn into the European conflict. The turmoil in Europe brought some good with the bad for the former. Strapped for cash to finance his European war, Napoleon offered to sell to the United States all of France’s holdings in the North Americas for 15 million dollars. Known as the Louisiana Purchase, the land acquired nearly doubled the size of the United States.
Both France and England interfered with the United States’ ability to conduct commerce by stopping, boarding, and sometimes confiscating cargo and crew. President Thomas Jefferson wanted no part of war with England; however, his successor, James Monroe, presided over a congress increasingly impatient with British harassment on the high seas and with British support of border raids in Canada by Indians into the territories. In 1807, the public was outraged when a British warship fired on and boarded the U. S. Navy frigate Chesapeake to retrieve suspected deserters. This event and others precipitated Henry Clay’s War Hawks capturing a majority of the seats in the 1810 congressional election. Two years later, under Monroe, Congress declared war on Great Britain, initiating the War of 1812, which galvanized and united the young republic. Convinced of its invincibility after Jackson’s defeat of the British army in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, the United States issued the Monroe Doctrine, informing all foreign powers that their influence in the Americas was over. Any attempts to colonize or to influence the sovereign nations of North or South America would be considered an unfriendly act by the newly powerful United States of America. One year later, in 1816, the State of Indiana was admitted to the Union, and American cotton began to flow again into European markets (Commager, Cunliffe, Jones, & Horton, 1976).
In addition to wars, and expansions, another kind of upheaval was beginning to take shape, one that would change the world in ways more dramatic and far-reaching than any armed conflict. Recent developments in machinery based on the patents of Arkwright, Fulton, and Watt were revolutionizing the manufacturing industry in Great Britain, principally the cotton industry. In 1816 the population of Great Britain was approximately 17 million; of those “one fourth were producers . . . the wealth of Great Britain and Ireland was produced by the manual labor of four millions and a quarter, assisted by mechanical and chemical power” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 126). In testimony before the House of Commons on Sir Robert Peel’s Factory Bill, a British cotton magnate claimed the amount of manual labor replaced by machinery in cotton spinning alone, “exceed[ed] and supercede[d] the manual labor of a population of eighty millions” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 127). If just one branch of one manufacturer superceded the manual labor of eighty million, then, Owen asked, “w\What must be the amount superceded by all the new mechanical and chemical powers which have been introduced into the operations of industry in the British Islands since the inventions of Arkwright and Watt?” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 127). It was estimated that in the wool, flax, and silk industries, machine production would replace the manual labor of over two hundred million persons (Owen, R., 1854).
The poor and underprivileged flocked to employment in the manufacturing industry, giving rise to the factory town. A cruel and unyielding environment often faced these families, who lived in crowded slums with poor sanitation and bad food, and who suffered long, harsh working conditions. It was not uncommon for children as young as five or six to work ten-hour shifts. High unemployment made families desperate, while investors and other capitalists reaped unheard of and often obscene profits from the labors of the lower class. Into this maelstrom of change stepped philanthropist, manufacturer, and social reformer Robert Owen. Like his competitors, Owen reaped the benefits from the system, but unlike them, he did not seek to squeeze more profit from the laborers who produced the wealth. Owen began experimenting with ways to improve the working and living conditions of his employees, and he began to observe that his changes resulted in an increase in productivity and happiness (Owen, R., 1857). Through these observations, he developed his theory of character formation and education that would lead him to establish the first secular utopian community in the Americas.
Robert Owen
Childhood
Robert Owen was born in Newton, Montgomeryshire, North Wales, on May 14, 1771. His father, Robert Owen, senior, was a saddler and ironmonger and the father of seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood. As young Robert passed his days in school and play, he developed a passion for reading. At the age of ten, he was sent to apprentice for three years with Mr. James McGuffog, a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire. The first year, while Robert was learning the trade was to be without pay; the second year he would be paid eight pounds; and the third, 20 pounds. Remuneration included board, lodging, and washing within the McGuffog house. The young Owen was quite precocious and learned a great deal about business during his three years while in Stamford. When his apprenticeship ended, McGuffog wanted to retain him, but Owen, then thirteen years old, chose instead to take a position in a retail house in London for 25 pounds a year. Owen worked in the London retail house from 8:00 a.m. until the shop closed at 11:00 p.m., after which he folded and arranged merchandise until 2:00 a.m. The long hours proved to be more than the 13-year-old could sustain, and Owen managed to find a position with another house in Manchester for 40 pounds a year, where he remained until the age of 18 (Owen, R., 1857).
Entrepreneur
While he was working in Manchester, Owen met a young mechanic named Jones, who was convinced he could manufacture the same spinning machines as were currently being brought on line in Manchester cotton factories. Owen borrowed 100 pounds from his brother William to become a partner in the production and selling of what were called “mules” for spinning cotton. Jones and Owen soon had a thriving business that employed 40 men. The business attracted investors who wanted to buy out Owen, and he happily accepted for “6 mules, a reel, and a making up machine, with which to pack the yarn when finished in skeins into bundles for sale. I had now, when about nineteen years of age, to begin the world on my own account” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 25).
Owen soon became very successful making and selling cotton thread for British muslin. It was at this time that a confident Robert Owen applied for the job of superintendent of a large cotton manufactory in Manchester. He was offered 300 pounds a year to supervise the Drinkwater mill; at the age of 20, he was managing this mill, which employed 500 workers. Robert excelled in this new environment where he learned to analyze and improve both the operation and the product. During this period, around 1816, the first American Sea Island cotton was beginning to hit the British market, and mills to process it were springing up all over the British Isles. It was also at this time that Owen began to develop insights into how to handle mill workers, “I early noticed the great attention given to the dead machinery, and the neglect and disregard of the living machinery” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 34). He believed that man did not form his own character and therefore was not a fit subject for praise or blame. This was a radical concept in a world that believed that the poor were poor because they were lazy and creatures of bad habits. With Owen’s view, the unfortunate could not be blamed for their poverty; nor could the wealthy take credit for their station. Owen began to write and to speak on his theories of character formation. He was invited to join the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, and he soon traveled in the most elite section of society.
At the height of his involvement in the Drinkwater mill, fate stepped in in the form of an ambitious son-in-law in the Drinkwater family. The son-in law wanted to take over the family business, and he wanted Owen out. Never one to stay where he was not wanted, Owen tore up his contract and left his then 500-pounds-a-year post to become again the entrepreneur. He developed the Chorlton Twist Company, a partnership that built and managed cotton mills. The company grew and expanded its operations into Scotland. It was on a trip to Scotland that he met the daughter of David Dale, one of the country’s foremost cotton manufacturers and owner of the New Lanark mills. When Robert Owen inspected the New Lanark mill, he said to a friend, “Of all places I have yet seen, I should prefer this in which to try an experiment I have long contemplated and wished to have an opportunity to put into practice” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 46). Owen offered to buy the New Lanark property for 60,000 pounds, and he also offered his proposal of marriage to Miss Dale. Both offers were accepted. Robert Owen and Anne Caroline Dale were wed on September 30, 1799. Robert Owen was 28 years old.
Reformer
The New Lanark mill employed 1300 cotton workers who lived together as families. There were also four to five hundred orphans and pauper children between the ages of five and ten. These children were “from various workhouses from the slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh. To get rid of them, workhouse authorities would send a carload of orphans, ages 6 and 7, to work in the mills” (American Atheists, 2000). At New Lanark, Owen refined his ideas that man’s character is formed for him and not by him. Owen believed one had only to change the environment to change the man, “There will be little difficulty in creating a good and valuable character for all, and in building up society with good conditions only” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 62). He started his reforms with the village, and although, “the working people were systematically opposed to every change which I proposed, and did whatever they could to frustrate my object” (Owen, R., p. 6), Owen pressed ahead with unilateral reform. He got rid of shops that sold inferior goods at high prices. He arranged for “superior” stores that would supply all the needs of the village. He bought goods in bulk and sold to the village at cost. This gave the villagers superior products at a 25% savings. He had the streets cleaned and sewers installed. He forbade the casting of refuse in the streets. He inspected the houses, insisting on weekly cleanings and annual white washings. He established districts with a “principal” in charge of each. He started a savings bank and a sick fund. Communal kitchens were established for working families, and by 1816, he reduced the workday to 12 hours. Over the course of time, New Lanark became a model of reform. Schools were established, and no child under 10 was allowed to work in the mills. When asked about his reasons for this decision in an appearance before a House of Commons committee, Owen said that the children, though well fed, were “deformed, their growth was stunted . . . in general they made very slow progress, even in the common alphabet” (Robert Owen, 2000, pp. 1-5).
Owen’s school became a showcase. He started the first infant school in Britain (a precursor to Foebel’s kindergarten), where students could be admitted as early as one year of age, and where they were taught by people who had “great love for and unlimited patience with infants” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 138). Teachers were “on no account ever to beat any one of the children, or to threaten them in any manner in word or action, or to use abusive terms; but were always to speak to them with a pleasant countenance kind manner and tone of voice” (p. 139). This attitude, along with a system based on natural inquiry and a curriculum filled with music, dance and military drill, was considered very avant-garde. The school became known as the Institute for the Formation of Character and received visitors from all around the world who observed and marveled at its success.
Owen truly loved and respected the common worker. He felt that owners ought to get five per cent return on invested capital, and all other profits above that amount should be returned to the workers in wages and improved working and living conditions. During the cotton embargo of 1806, when other mills were closing and laying off workers, Owen kept his employees on at full wages to perform maintenance on machines. This secured for him much respect and cooperation from his workers. When the embargo lifted, New Lanark, with its workers and its machines ready to go, was able to leap into production ahead of all the other mills. Wages during the down time had cost him 7000 pounds, but the profits he realized by getting a jump on the other factories were three times that, which caused jealous mill owners and investors to harden their opposition to Owen’s ideas of industrial reform.
Owen’s writings and speeches about his ideas regarding character formation and industrial reform, brought him much celebrity. During the period and from 1815 to 1820, he was visited by all the famous and influential figures of the day, including the Prince of Wales, the King and Queen of Norway, and the leaders of the House of Commons. However, this support was countered by mill owner-sponsored legislation designed to prevent the government from interfering with someone’s right to do business as they saw fit. At the heart of the philosophical debate was the question of what creates man’s nature. As this debate intensified under public scrutiny, Owen became convinced that it was the mythology of religion, with its concept free will, that allowed a Christian nation to justify keeping its poorest people in virtual slavery. In a public meeting, Owen declared false religion to be the true oppressor of mankind. This “irresistible power of truth” caused a backlash among the “religions and party underlings” that set them against this “mere cotton spinner and man of trade” (Owen, R., p.157). Owen’s tirades against religion alienated his supporters and hardened the resolve of his enemies. It became increasingly clear that, rather than thinking of Robert Owen as a mere reformer, Britain began to view him as a heretic and a threat to Christianity. The clergy convinced Owen’s New Lanark workers that, as an atheist, Owen was ungodly and a threat to Christianity. When his own workers refused to elect him as their representative in Parliament, Owen resolved to prove his theory on some foreign shore where he could build the perfect utopian community free from European provincialism.
Utopian Dream
In 1824 Owen was considering establishing his proposed utopian community in Ireland, away from the blue noses he had offended by calling all religion “superstition.” At the same time, Father George Rapp wanted to sell the community of Harmonie he and his followers had established in the state of Indiana in the United States. Father Rapp had commissioned Richard Flower, an Englishman from Albion, Illinois, to sell the entire 30,000 acres with its village, its manufactories, farms, and buildings. In August of 1824, Flower met with Robert Owen in New Lanark and mentioned the Rappite property: “Flower was surprised at Owen’s immediate interest, finding it difficult to believe that the Scotsman would abandon his comfortable status and profitable mills for an idealist experiment on a distant continent he had never visited” (Carmony & Elliott, 1980/1999, p. 164).
On October 2, 1824, two months after meeting with Flower, Owen set sail from Liverpool with his youngest son William and Captain Donald MacDonald to visit the Harmonie site. As benefited his celebrity, he met with many of the important leaders of business, culture and politics when he arrived in the United States, including President James Monroe. Owen and his party arrived at Harmonie, Indiana, on December 16, accompanied by Frederich Rapp, the adopted son of Father George Rapp. On January 1, 1825, Robert Owen purchased the village of Harmonie and 20,000 acres of land for $125,000 of his own money. He renamed the village New Harmony and took ownership of 180 log, frame, and brick structures, public buildings, manufacturing establishments, shops and housing for 700 (Carmony & Elliott, 1980). Owen left his son William and Captain MacDonald at New Harmony and set off to return to New Lanark. On the way, he spoke twice at the United States House of Representatives, met with incoming President John Quincy Adams, and stayed overnight with former President Thomas Jefferson.
Perhaps Owen had been swept away by his reception on the continent; perhaps he was just anxious to start on his dream. For whatever reason, he did not formulate any plans to administer his new community. In spite of his reputation as an effective manager and a “hands on” type supervisor, Robert Owen ignored his son William’s advice to exercise caution in admitting persons to the community. While in the East, he “issued a manifesto inviting all who were in sympathy with his aims to proceed to New Harmony to join the New Community” (Carmony & Elliott, 1980, p. 167). Hundreds responded to the invitation, overwhelming young William Owen in the absence of his father. “The enjoyment of a reformer” William confided in his journal “is much more in the contemplation than in the reality” (Owen, W., 1906/1973, p. 129).
When Robert Owen returned to New Harmony on April 13, 1825, he found the village in chaos. Seven to eight hundred individuals already packed the town, and more people arrived every day. Primarily dreamers and ne’er-do-wells, the would-be settlers were woefully short of skilled trades people and willing laborers. They looked to newly-returned Robert Owen to provide the stability that the community was lacking (Wilson, 1964). The next chapter will discuss Owen’s attempts to unify the community.
Summary
The currents of history that swept Robert Owen to the shores of the Wabash in 1825 were numerous. The conditions in Europe cried out for reform, and compassionate men like Owen heeded the call. Without the rising tide of wealth created in textile manufacturing, these men would not have had the resources to attempt to ameliorate the workers’ squalid living conditions. A frenetic global political climate helped to create the burgeoning young democracy whose open-arms policy invited a variety of social reformers to experiment with new community structures. All these elements had conspired to bring this charismatic Englishman to the lush forests of the New World in order to try his hand at creating a new society. What follows is an account of the major historical events that transpired after Robert Owen’s return to the village of New Harmony in the spring of 1825.
The heat is stultifying, oppressive. I am sitting under the triple canopy hardwood forest of the Ohio River basin, and the sweat is running along my sides and down my temples in rivulets. Muggy is a word that comes to mind. Muggy is a word from childhood that my aunts would use to describe a warm, moist day, an uncomfortably damp day. This is way beyond muggy; this is hot, furnace hot. This is Vietnam hot.
Above New Harmony, Indiana, everything is green, almost painfully green. On the slopes above the wide, shallow, fast water of the Wabash River, the white and red oak, the exotic sassafras, the papaw, and the Eastern redbud mingle with the flowering dogwood, the persimmon, and the pecan trees. The shadows grow long, and the cicadas burst forth with their high-pitched chatter. The dark rises from the ground and fills the gaps between the shadows. Suddenly, the dark is broken by a tiny but intense burst of light, then another, and another. My God, fireflies! Hundreds of them. Little insect supernovas. I have never before seen a firefly. I am transfixed and watch them for half an hour without moving.
I begin to realize that these fireflies are not unlike the utopian society I have come to study here at the New Harmony site. Robert Owen and his intrepid band were cultural fireflies that lit up for one brief moment with the promise of a better way of living for mankind, and here I am, 170 years later, chasing that speck of light trying to understand what they sought to illuminate.
Introduction
The following chapter sets the time and place of this study. It introduces the reader to the geography and brief history of the area where the New Harmony community was established. It also provides a biographical sketch of Robert Owen, as well as some acknowledgement of the social and political forces that were in play at the beginning of the eighteenth century. A history of the Owenite community is then explored, that introduces the major historical figures and the events that transpired between the founding and the dissolution of the community.
The Setting
The area of southwestern Indiana called the “pocket” lies between the confluence of the Wabash and the Ohio Rivers. In ancient times, before White settlers came, the area was inhabited by the central Algonquin tribes – the Potowatomies, the Weas, and the Piankershaws. These tribes, by the 17th century, had formed the Miami Confederation in order to defend their tribal lands against encroachment by the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. “By the time the first European settlers came into the area, the tribes were weakened by defeats in war and in the disruptions to their traditional life” (Access Indiana, 2000, p. 2).
During the 1700s the French made claim to the great American Northwest and, in 1750, they built a fort at the mouth of the Wabash. England took possession of the area after France’s defeat in the French and Indian War. The area now known as Indiana was a county of Virginia before the formation of the Northwest Territory. The first settlers began to trickle in sometime between 1790 and 1800. Thomas Jones is credited with building the first cabin in the area, followed by Samuel Black, Nathaniel Miller, William and Isaac James, George Henchat, and Peter Roach, who established a trading post on the Wabash to cater to the flatboat business (Access Indiana, 2000, p. 2).
In 1814, by act of the Territorial Legislature, the forestland located at the juncture of the Till Plains and the Southern Hills became Posey County, named in honor of Tomas Posey who was an officer in the French and Indian, and the Revolutionary Wars. Posey was also the sitting governor of the Indiana Territory at the time. It was during this period that large-scale settlement of the area began. In June, 1814, the town of Harmonie was established on the Wabash by the German Pietist George Rapp and his followers.
Social and political turmoil of the times gave rise to many social experiments. In Europe the bloody French Revolution had dissolved into the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. France and England had been fighting for 20 years; in the Americas, the fledgling United States—the ink just dry on its Constitution—was struggling for direction and unity while trying to avoid getting drawn into the European conflict. The turmoil in Europe brought some good with the bad for the former. Strapped for cash to finance his European war, Napoleon offered to sell to the United States all of France’s holdings in the North Americas for 15 million dollars. Known as the Louisiana Purchase, the land acquired nearly doubled the size of the United States.
Both France and England interfered with the United States’ ability to conduct commerce by stopping, boarding, and sometimes confiscating cargo and crew. President Thomas Jefferson wanted no part of war with England; however, his successor, James Monroe, presided over a congress increasingly impatient with British harassment on the high seas and with British support of border raids in Canada by Indians into the territories. In 1807, the public was outraged when a British warship fired on and boarded the U. S. Navy frigate Chesapeake to retrieve suspected deserters. This event and others precipitated Henry Clay’s War Hawks capturing a majority of the seats in the 1810 congressional election. Two years later, under Monroe, Congress declared war on Great Britain, initiating the War of 1812, which galvanized and united the young republic. Convinced of its invincibility after Jackson’s defeat of the British army in the 1815 Battle of New Orleans, the United States issued the Monroe Doctrine, informing all foreign powers that their influence in the Americas was over. Any attempts to colonize or to influence the sovereign nations of North or South America would be considered an unfriendly act by the newly powerful United States of America. One year later, in 1816, the State of Indiana was admitted to the Union, and American cotton began to flow again into European markets (Commager, Cunliffe, Jones, & Horton, 1976).
In addition to wars, and expansions, another kind of upheaval was beginning to take shape, one that would change the world in ways more dramatic and far-reaching than any armed conflict. Recent developments in machinery based on the patents of Arkwright, Fulton, and Watt were revolutionizing the manufacturing industry in Great Britain, principally the cotton industry. In 1816 the population of Great Britain was approximately 17 million; of those “one fourth were producers . . . the wealth of Great Britain and Ireland was produced by the manual labor of four millions and a quarter, assisted by mechanical and chemical power” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 126). In testimony before the House of Commons on Sir Robert Peel’s Factory Bill, a British cotton magnate claimed the amount of manual labor replaced by machinery in cotton spinning alone, “exceed[ed] and supercede[d] the manual labor of a population of eighty millions” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 127). If just one branch of one manufacturer superceded the manual labor of eighty million, then, Owen asked, “w\What must be the amount superceded by all the new mechanical and chemical powers which have been introduced into the operations of industry in the British Islands since the inventions of Arkwright and Watt?” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 127). It was estimated that in the wool, flax, and silk industries, machine production would replace the manual labor of over two hundred million persons (Owen, R., 1854).
The poor and underprivileged flocked to employment in the manufacturing industry, giving rise to the factory town. A cruel and unyielding environment often faced these families, who lived in crowded slums with poor sanitation and bad food, and who suffered long, harsh working conditions. It was not uncommon for children as young as five or six to work ten-hour shifts. High unemployment made families desperate, while investors and other capitalists reaped unheard of and often obscene profits from the labors of the lower class. Into this maelstrom of change stepped philanthropist, manufacturer, and social reformer Robert Owen. Like his competitors, Owen reaped the benefits from the system, but unlike them, he did not seek to squeeze more profit from the laborers who produced the wealth. Owen began experimenting with ways to improve the working and living conditions of his employees, and he began to observe that his changes resulted in an increase in productivity and happiness (Owen, R., 1857). Through these observations, he developed his theory of character formation and education that would lead him to establish the first secular utopian community in the Americas.
Robert Owen
Childhood
Robert Owen was born in Newton, Montgomeryshire, North Wales, on May 14, 1771. His father, Robert Owen, senior, was a saddler and ironmonger and the father of seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood. As young Robert passed his days in school and play, he developed a passion for reading. At the age of ten, he was sent to apprentice for three years with Mr. James McGuffog, a draper in Stamford, Lincolnshire. The first year, while Robert was learning the trade was to be without pay; the second year he would be paid eight pounds; and the third, 20 pounds. Remuneration included board, lodging, and washing within the McGuffog house. The young Owen was quite precocious and learned a great deal about business during his three years while in Stamford. When his apprenticeship ended, McGuffog wanted to retain him, but Owen, then thirteen years old, chose instead to take a position in a retail house in London for 25 pounds a year. Owen worked in the London retail house from 8:00 a.m. until the shop closed at 11:00 p.m., after which he folded and arranged merchandise until 2:00 a.m. The long hours proved to be more than the 13-year-old could sustain, and Owen managed to find a position with another house in Manchester for 40 pounds a year, where he remained until the age of 18 (Owen, R., 1857).
Entrepreneur
While he was working in Manchester, Owen met a young mechanic named Jones, who was convinced he could manufacture the same spinning machines as were currently being brought on line in Manchester cotton factories. Owen borrowed 100 pounds from his brother William to become a partner in the production and selling of what were called “mules” for spinning cotton. Jones and Owen soon had a thriving business that employed 40 men. The business attracted investors who wanted to buy out Owen, and he happily accepted for “6 mules, a reel, and a making up machine, with which to pack the yarn when finished in skeins into bundles for sale. I had now, when about nineteen years of age, to begin the world on my own account” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 25).
Owen soon became very successful making and selling cotton thread for British muslin. It was at this time that a confident Robert Owen applied for the job of superintendent of a large cotton manufactory in Manchester. He was offered 300 pounds a year to supervise the Drinkwater mill; at the age of 20, he was managing this mill, which employed 500 workers. Robert excelled in this new environment where he learned to analyze and improve both the operation and the product. During this period, around 1816, the first American Sea Island cotton was beginning to hit the British market, and mills to process it were springing up all over the British Isles. It was also at this time that Owen began to develop insights into how to handle mill workers, “I early noticed the great attention given to the dead machinery, and the neglect and disregard of the living machinery” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 34). He believed that man did not form his own character and therefore was not a fit subject for praise or blame. This was a radical concept in a world that believed that the poor were poor because they were lazy and creatures of bad habits. With Owen’s view, the unfortunate could not be blamed for their poverty; nor could the wealthy take credit for their station. Owen began to write and to speak on his theories of character formation. He was invited to join the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, and he soon traveled in the most elite section of society.
At the height of his involvement in the Drinkwater mill, fate stepped in in the form of an ambitious son-in-law in the Drinkwater family. The son-in law wanted to take over the family business, and he wanted Owen out. Never one to stay where he was not wanted, Owen tore up his contract and left his then 500-pounds-a-year post to become again the entrepreneur. He developed the Chorlton Twist Company, a partnership that built and managed cotton mills. The company grew and expanded its operations into Scotland. It was on a trip to Scotland that he met the daughter of David Dale, one of the country’s foremost cotton manufacturers and owner of the New Lanark mills. When Robert Owen inspected the New Lanark mill, he said to a friend, “Of all places I have yet seen, I should prefer this in which to try an experiment I have long contemplated and wished to have an opportunity to put into practice” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 46). Owen offered to buy the New Lanark property for 60,000 pounds, and he also offered his proposal of marriage to Miss Dale. Both offers were accepted. Robert Owen and Anne Caroline Dale were wed on September 30, 1799. Robert Owen was 28 years old.
Reformer
The New Lanark mill employed 1300 cotton workers who lived together as families. There were also four to five hundred orphans and pauper children between the ages of five and ten. These children were “from various workhouses from the slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh. To get rid of them, workhouse authorities would send a carload of orphans, ages 6 and 7, to work in the mills” (American Atheists, 2000). At New Lanark, Owen refined his ideas that man’s character is formed for him and not by him. Owen believed one had only to change the environment to change the man, “There will be little difficulty in creating a good and valuable character for all, and in building up society with good conditions only” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 62). He started his reforms with the village, and although, “the working people were systematically opposed to every change which I proposed, and did whatever they could to frustrate my object” (Owen, R., p. 6), Owen pressed ahead with unilateral reform. He got rid of shops that sold inferior goods at high prices. He arranged for “superior” stores that would supply all the needs of the village. He bought goods in bulk and sold to the village at cost. This gave the villagers superior products at a 25% savings. He had the streets cleaned and sewers installed. He forbade the casting of refuse in the streets. He inspected the houses, insisting on weekly cleanings and annual white washings. He established districts with a “principal” in charge of each. He started a savings bank and a sick fund. Communal kitchens were established for working families, and by 1816, he reduced the workday to 12 hours. Over the course of time, New Lanark became a model of reform. Schools were established, and no child under 10 was allowed to work in the mills. When asked about his reasons for this decision in an appearance before a House of Commons committee, Owen said that the children, though well fed, were “deformed, their growth was stunted . . . in general they made very slow progress, even in the common alphabet” (Robert Owen, 2000, pp. 1-5).
Owen’s school became a showcase. He started the first infant school in Britain (a precursor to Foebel’s kindergarten), where students could be admitted as early as one year of age, and where they were taught by people who had “great love for and unlimited patience with infants” (Owen, R., 1857, p. 138). Teachers were “on no account ever to beat any one of the children, or to threaten them in any manner in word or action, or to use abusive terms; but were always to speak to them with a pleasant countenance kind manner and tone of voice” (p. 139). This attitude, along with a system based on natural inquiry and a curriculum filled with music, dance and military drill, was considered very avant-garde. The school became known as the Institute for the Formation of Character and received visitors from all around the world who observed and marveled at its success.
Owen truly loved and respected the common worker. He felt that owners ought to get five per cent return on invested capital, and all other profits above that amount should be returned to the workers in wages and improved working and living conditions. During the cotton embargo of 1806, when other mills were closing and laying off workers, Owen kept his employees on at full wages to perform maintenance on machines. This secured for him much respect and cooperation from his workers. When the embargo lifted, New Lanark, with its workers and its machines ready to go, was able to leap into production ahead of all the other mills. Wages during the down time had cost him 7000 pounds, but the profits he realized by getting a jump on the other factories were three times that, which caused jealous mill owners and investors to harden their opposition to Owen’s ideas of industrial reform.
Owen’s writings and speeches about his ideas regarding character formation and industrial reform, brought him much celebrity. During the period and from 1815 to 1820, he was visited by all the famous and influential figures of the day, including the Prince of Wales, the King and Queen of Norway, and the leaders of the House of Commons. However, this support was countered by mill owner-sponsored legislation designed to prevent the government from interfering with someone’s right to do business as they saw fit. At the heart of the philosophical debate was the question of what creates man’s nature. As this debate intensified under public scrutiny, Owen became convinced that it was the mythology of religion, with its concept free will, that allowed a Christian nation to justify keeping its poorest people in virtual slavery. In a public meeting, Owen declared false religion to be the true oppressor of mankind. This “irresistible power of truth” caused a backlash among the “religions and party underlings” that set them against this “mere cotton spinner and man of trade” (Owen, R., p.157). Owen’s tirades against religion alienated his supporters and hardened the resolve of his enemies. It became increasingly clear that, rather than thinking of Robert Owen as a mere reformer, Britain began to view him as a heretic and a threat to Christianity. The clergy convinced Owen’s New Lanark workers that, as an atheist, Owen was ungodly and a threat to Christianity. When his own workers refused to elect him as their representative in Parliament, Owen resolved to prove his theory on some foreign shore where he could build the perfect utopian community free from European provincialism.
Utopian Dream
In 1824 Owen was considering establishing his proposed utopian community in Ireland, away from the blue noses he had offended by calling all religion “superstition.” At the same time, Father George Rapp wanted to sell the community of Harmonie he and his followers had established in the state of Indiana in the United States. Father Rapp had commissioned Richard Flower, an Englishman from Albion, Illinois, to sell the entire 30,000 acres with its village, its manufactories, farms, and buildings. In August of 1824, Flower met with Robert Owen in New Lanark and mentioned the Rappite property: “Flower was surprised at Owen’s immediate interest, finding it difficult to believe that the Scotsman would abandon his comfortable status and profitable mills for an idealist experiment on a distant continent he had never visited” (Carmony & Elliott, 1980/1999, p. 164).
On October 2, 1824, two months after meeting with Flower, Owen set sail from Liverpool with his youngest son William and Captain Donald MacDonald to visit the Harmonie site. As benefited his celebrity, he met with many of the important leaders of business, culture and politics when he arrived in the United States, including President James Monroe. Owen and his party arrived at Harmonie, Indiana, on December 16, accompanied by Frederich Rapp, the adopted son of Father George Rapp. On January 1, 1825, Robert Owen purchased the village of Harmonie and 20,000 acres of land for $125,000 of his own money. He renamed the village New Harmony and took ownership of 180 log, frame, and brick structures, public buildings, manufacturing establishments, shops and housing for 700 (Carmony & Elliott, 1980). Owen left his son William and Captain MacDonald at New Harmony and set off to return to New Lanark. On the way, he spoke twice at the United States House of Representatives, met with incoming President John Quincy Adams, and stayed overnight with former President Thomas Jefferson.
Perhaps Owen had been swept away by his reception on the continent; perhaps he was just anxious to start on his dream. For whatever reason, he did not formulate any plans to administer his new community. In spite of his reputation as an effective manager and a “hands on” type supervisor, Robert Owen ignored his son William’s advice to exercise caution in admitting persons to the community. While in the East, he “issued a manifesto inviting all who were in sympathy with his aims to proceed to New Harmony to join the New Community” (Carmony & Elliott, 1980, p. 167). Hundreds responded to the invitation, overwhelming young William Owen in the absence of his father. “The enjoyment of a reformer” William confided in his journal “is much more in the contemplation than in the reality” (Owen, W., 1906/1973, p. 129).
When Robert Owen returned to New Harmony on April 13, 1825, he found the village in chaos. Seven to eight hundred individuals already packed the town, and more people arrived every day. Primarily dreamers and ne’er-do-wells, the would-be settlers were woefully short of skilled trades people and willing laborers. They looked to newly-returned Robert Owen to provide the stability that the community was lacking (Wilson, 1964). The next chapter will discuss Owen’s attempts to unify the community.
Summary
The currents of history that swept Robert Owen to the shores of the Wabash in 1825 were numerous. The conditions in Europe cried out for reform, and compassionate men like Owen heeded the call. Without the rising tide of wealth created in textile manufacturing, these men would not have had the resources to attempt to ameliorate the workers’ squalid living conditions. A frenetic global political climate helped to create the burgeoning young democracy whose open-arms policy invited a variety of social reformers to experiment with new community structures. All these elements had conspired to bring this charismatic Englishman to the lush forests of the New World in order to try his hand at creating a new society. What follows is an account of the major historical events that transpired after Robert Owen’s return to the village of New Harmony in the spring of 1825.
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