History of American Socialisms
John Humphrey Noyes
JB Lippencott & Company
1870
678 pages
John Humphrey Noyes was the founder of the Oneida Community, one of the most successful utopian-socialist societies of the United States. Founded in 1848, the community thrived until 1881 upon principles of communal sharing of property and the belief that Christ’s return had already occurred and therefore the heavenly kingdom may then be built upon earth. The journalist Charles Nordhoff, in his 1875 book The Communistic Societies of the United States referred to Noyes group as the perfectionists and he devoted a chapter to describing their customs and lifestyle.
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Noyes
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Noyes wrote his history of other utopian communities, originally published in 1870, in response to an unpublished book of a history of such groups written by an A. J. MacDonald who was a great admirer of these societies and their philosophical inspirations such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. According to Noyes introduction, MacDonald died some time in the 1850s and Noyes and his associates had found MacDonalds research notes and from those materials he constructed this text in combination with his own views and some additional research. Yale University, in their rare books and manuscripts collection, actually has MacDonald’s research papers and notes, which were given to Yale by Noyes as a gift.
History of American Socialisms is a long and comprehensive book about the phenomena of Utopian societies in 19th century America. Over the course of 48 chapters, Noyes gives the details of virtually every aspect of utopian communities, from their philosophical influences, to the aspect of religion, to the individual and specific communities, and in rare cases, the specific effect of certain influences on certain communities (such as the chapter on Swedenborgianism on the venerable Brook Farm community). The longest chapter in Noyes history was on the Wisconsin Phalanx (the phalanxes were societies specifically based on the utopian socialist ideas of French idealist philosopher, Charles Fourier) and Noyes’ own Oneida Community, which was one of the longest lasting of these societies, and the one which the author could speak about at length with great authority.
Noyes also inserts many of his own views, and in particular, the importance of religion to these societies was often stated by the author. Noyes himself was a theologian who “discovered” that Christ had made his second coming in 70 ad, a peculiar perspective that provided the ground for the beliefs of his society. Furthermore, the author notes that most of the utopian societies barely survived a year, and he believes that those societies that had cleaved themselves to religious principles were more successful.
Noyes view that a mix of socialist politics and millenarian religion keeps a group together has a truth to it that, I'm sure, most contemporary activists who admire socialistic communities would like to dismiss. At the time of this book's publication, Noyes own community was in its second decade, and most of the other groups he describes were long gone. The Oneida Community is now long gone too but some communities continue, and are hardly acknowledged as countercultural by current activists, who would love to establish long-term socialist communities, because they cannot conceive of spiritual belief as anything other than a strategy deployed by authorities for the purpose of deceiving unsophisticated adherents into obedience. Noyes history reveals that people can successfully and sincerely combine socialist politics and religion into the theoretical foundation for a new way of life.
Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850
Anne C. Rose
Yale University Press
1981
269 pages
A good day to you. I purchased Transcendentalism as a Social Movement from Seekers Books in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood.
There are scores of books about the American Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. The Transcendentalists were a group of poets and thinkers that orbited around Ralph Waldo Emmerson,
the essayist son of a Unitarian minister who combined socialist
political ideals with pantheistic spirituality. The Transcendentalists
included Margaret Fuller, a proto-feminist journalist, and Henry David Thoreau, one of the best known American philosophers whose book Walden,
the author’s edited journal about the experience of living simply and
close to nature, is still cited by all varieties of social drop-outs
(it’s mentioned as a favorite book of one of Jennifer Toth’s Mole People, for example) while his essay Civil Disobedience
continues to be quoted by political dissidents on all points of the
left-right spectrum. Most of the existing books on the
Transcendentalists approach the movement as a literary or philosophical
school. In Transcendentalism as a Social Movement,
historian Anne C. Rose takes the much less common approach to the group
as a social movement that was intent on developing new ways of living.
Anne C. Rose is currently a distinguished professor at Penn State University (America’s #1 party school according to a 2009 episode of This American Life).
She is a historian of American culture who works in Penn State’s
Department of History and Religious studies, and although she has a long
and varied publishing record, most of her research has focused on the
history of psychiatry or on American religious practice. Transcendentalism as a Social Movement
was Rose’s first book, and according to her preface, it began as her
doctoral dissertation. Rose thus focuses on Transcendentalism as a
spiritual and socialist movement in the American context, emerging from a
milieu of progressive churches and religious communities operating in
and nearby to Boston Massachusetts, during the early-to-mid 19th
century.
Rose’s
book begins with a discussion of these churches, and in particular the
emergence of Unitarianism in Boston during the late 18th century. Unitarianism
is a belief system that became popular in Boston during the early 19th
century that considers God to be a single entity, thereby denying the
divinity of Jesus. Christ is an exemplar of moral behavior but is not a
divine authority, and individuals may exercise their free will, ideally
in emulation of Christ’s model. Unitarianism also resists the idea
that any church may claim authority over interpreting the Bible. Rose
discusses in depth the fluctuations in popularity of the Unitarian
Churches in Boston that provided citizens with a greater spiritual
freedom than the Protestant churches that dominated the region.
Rose
discusses Unitarianism as a means of introducing the cultural climate
that Transcendentalism developed in. While Unitarianism never claimed a
majority of worshippers, its popularity did give rise to a number of
spiritual debates at the time, plus it demonstrated the possibility for
alternatives to the Protestant church. Transcendentalism developed as
the most radical of all the alternatives, as a mixture of Romantic
poetry, pantheistic Christianity, and pre-Marxist political socialism
vis-a-vis the ideas of Charles Fourier.
Because Rose’s text is focused on the group as a social, rather than
literary or spiritual, movement, many of the chapters are about those
members who were most socially active (and therefore not Henry David
Thoreau). Rose includes profiles of the most socially significant
Transcendentalists, including men like George Ripley, who left little writing but was a unique Unitarian minister whose involvement with the Transcendentalists led him to found Brook Farm (a Transcendentalist farm collective that Rose discussed at length) with his wife Sophia Ripley. Elizabeth Peabody
is another of the Transcendentalists discussed at length by Rose, whose
work was primarily focused on new ideas in education and the domestic
sphere. These individuals were engaged with reforming the social sphere
in accordance with recently emergent ideas about liberal spirituality.
Much of the book is about the social activism of these figures and
their fight against slavery or the subjugation of women.
Rose’s
book is a comprehensive look at the Transcendentalists on an axis other
than the literary. Rose’s analysis of the cultural milieu that the
Transcendentalists grew out of as social activists is fascinating. The
historical analysis of Brook Farm brings the Transcendentalists onto
similar spiritual-social ground as the religious groups discussed in The Communistic Societies of the United States by Charles Nordhoff.
Rose’s book also contains appendices which provide tabled details
about Unitarian churches in Boston, and about the Brook Farm collective.
Finally, Rose contains a comprehensive bibliography which organizes
texts by Transcendentalists according to their activist causes, which is
a useful tool for further research on the Transcendentalists or on the
activist rhetoric of certain subjects.
