In the mid-19th Century there was a social movement, mostly in the US, based on the idea that it was possible to create an ideal, perfect community. Quite a few such communities were founded and many continued for years. Their plan was to demonstrate that if a small community could thrive by following their ideas of organization, economics, cooperation, and often, but not always, religion, the wider US society would follow their example. The movement was later termed “utopian socialism,” where “utopian” was more a term of derision to emphasize the founders’ naiveté in ignoring current economic ideas. To be fair, the term was cooked up by later “scientific socialists” (the next wave of socialist thought), and the “current economic ideas” they were talking about were things like the class struggle described by Marx and Engels. The fact that Marx and Engels started publishing years after the utopian socialists was rather ignored.
Anyway, one of the utopian socialists — the one born on September 3, 1811 — was John Humphrey Noyes. He founded not one but three communities: Putney, Wallingford, and Oneida. They were named for their locations, near the towns of Putney in Vermont, Wallingford in Connecticut, and Oneida in New York.
Noyes’ approach to utopian socialism was based on religion. He entered the Yale Theological Seminary when he was 21 to study to become a Christian minister. His plan up until the previous year had been to study law, but after attending a sermon by Charles Finney, a popular preacher in a religious revival movement in the US at the time, he became fixated on religion. Noyes’ approach to religion, though, was somewhat outside the mainstream. One of the basic tenets of the Christian religion is that Christ will return at some point and eliminate sin from mankind. But Noyes tried to figure out when that return was going to happen, and concluded that it already had, many centuries earlier in 70 CE.
This was a serious deviation from Christian orthodoxy, and what he did next was even worse; he decided that since Christ had already returned, Noyes himself was completely free of sin. Keep in mind that he was basically a college freshman at this stage, and might deserve to be cut a bit of slack, but in the 1830s his claims were too much for the religious authorities, and they chucked him out of Yale. It’s not completely clear what he did in the immediate aftermath, but we have a term for what he turned out to be starting around 1838. He became a cult leader.
Since he had decided that he didn’t (and actually couldn’t) commit any sinful acts, he could (in his own estimation) do anything and it should be okay. He must have been persuasive, because he began to attract converts. He focused on one couple, Mr. and Mrs. Cragin — or perhaps we should say he was focused on Mrs. Cragin. He talked them (and his own wife) into entering what he called a “complex marriage,” where all four were married to all the others. He probably would have gotten away with it except that in 1848 he decided that this “complex marriage” scheme could be extended in scope to any female converts he thought were particularly attractive — er, I mean, um, “worthy.” Or something. Anyway, he started recruiting among the young women of local towns. This was also another serious deviation, but this time from actual laws, and the authorities chucked him into jail. When he was released and awaiting trial, he and his, well, cult members, skipped town and went to Oneida, New York.
The very next year Noyes founded his Oneida Community, basing it on communal possession of property, group marriage, and something Noyes called “stirpiculture,” which was the first experiment in eugenics in the US. The basic idea was that he tried breeding humans based on traits he thought were superior. The community had as many as 300 members, and had a few smaller branches in places in the northeast US like Putney, Vermont and Wallingford, Connecticut.
Although they were a socialist, utopian community, they still had to bring in some amount of money to survive, and they turned out to be pretty good at that. They had quite a number of successful crafts and industries, and in 1877 (just four years before the community itself dissolved), began manufacturing silver tableware. That effort still exists as the Oneida Limited silverware company, which is still one of the world leaders in the manufacture of forks, knives, and spoons.
But back to Noyes. The authorities of the conventional town of Oneida, New York, took a dim view of Noyes and what they knew of his activities in the cult…er, community, and in 1879 he found out he was just about to be arrested for statutory rape. In the middle of the night he fled to Ontario, Canada. In what I’m sure was just a coincidence, he decided that it was time for the community to abandon his “complex marriage” system and live more conventionally (he told them so in a letter). Without Noyes, who never returned, the community lasted only another couple of years. Noyes’ followers, or at least some of them, stuck with him, some even moving to Canada, although he didn’t try to found another community. He lived another few years, until 1886. Part of the Oneida Community still exists, and houses a museum as well as meeting and banquet facilities. And of course you can get a nice set of forks, knives, and spoons almost anywhere.
