Undeterred by the Icarian misadventure, another French socialist dreamer followed close on Cabet’s heels. La Réunion was founded in 1854 with the establishment of the European Society for the Colonization of Texas, by Victor Considérant, a French socialist and republican revolutionary. Considérant had been an engineer in the French army but resigned his commission in the 1830s, after becoming radicalized by the corruption of the monarchy, and sallied forth into the hurly-burly of French politics as a socialist propagandist.
In time he became the primary exponent and popularizer of the decidedly peculiar political philosophy of François Marie Charles Fourier. Considérant authored many books and edited several different newspapers. His writings seem to have greatly influenced Marx (and Dostoyevsky, albeit negatively), and his Principes du socialisme of 1847 reads like an early draft of The Communist Manifesto.
Considérant’s general critique of capitalism bears striking similarities to Marx’s, though his conclusions are very different. For Considérant, violent revolution was a great evil, and its prospect was treated as a warning rather than a desirable end. Like Rousseau, Considérant believed that man was born free yet was everywhere enchained by the fetters of society, which had corrupted man’s naturally virtuous passions and impulses. Although he espoused one of the least realistic political philosophies of modernity, during his period of political activity Considérant was far from being a starry-eyed utopian. Humanity as he found it was not prepared for Fourier’s orgiastic phalanstery—communal living arrangements that involved the abolition of the family, free love, and other polyamorous schemes. Much work remained in the area of social evolution before anything like that could be viable in the nineteenth century. As a political revolutionary and socialist, Considérant worked to democratize the society that he lived in. He advocated the creation of social welfare programs, democratic and dispersed ownership of railroads, low-interest government loans, separation of church and state, freedom of expression, pacifism, and disarmament. In the midst of France’s permanent revolution, Considérant was a relatively practical democratic socialist. Life on the Texas frontier proved a far greater challenge.
Convicted of treason in 1849, Considérant fled to Belgium. His follower Albert Brisbane, whose work inspired the Brook Farm utopian community in Massachusetts, had long encouraged him to found a community, or phalanx in the jargon of Fourier, in the United States. Considérant did not at first wish to found a commune, and for a long time he spurned Brisbane’s entreaties. Like Marx, he thought that a socialist society must arise from an industrialized, fully modern society. But after Considérant was driven from France into an unhappy exile, Brisbane and other Fourierists persuaded him to attempt an experimental phalanx.
In 1852, Considérant came to America and visited a commune in New Jersey called the North American Phalanx. He saw little in that mismanaged community that he recognized as Fourierism. He met up with Brisbane near Cincinnati. Together with other Fourier disciples they steamed down the Ohio to the Mississippi and up the Arkansas River, passing through Little Rock and finally disembarking at Fort Smith. From there they rode horseback down the Texas Road through Indian Territory and crossed the Red River into Texas.
Considérant was enraptured by the countryside north of Dallas. His doubts about America were conquered, at least temporarily. “Nature has done all. All is prepared, all is arranged: we have only to raise those buildings which the eye is astonished at not finding; and nothing is appropriated nor separated by the selfish exclusiveness of civilized man; nothing is cramped. What fields of action! What a theatre of maneuvers for a great colonization operating in the combined and collective mode! What reserves for the cradle of Harmony, and how powerful and prompt would be its development, if the living and willing elements of the World of the Future were transported there! A horizon of new ideas, new sentiments and hopes, suddenly opened before me, and I felt myself baptized in an American faith.”
After returning to Belgium, Considérant soon published two books—Au Texas and The Great West: A New Social and Industrial Life in Its Fertile Regions—announcing his great plan to colonize the future in Texas. The books contained detailed plans for the future colony, together with dire and, as it turned out, prophetic warnings of the difficulties that attend those who seek to win the future. “On our globe,” he wrote, “America is at present the Country of Realizations. Its spirit is that of diversity, of movement and enterprise, the love of inventions, of experiments, of adventures. It is absolutely the opposite of our old Europe, timorous and enslaved to routine, even in its progressive aspects; despotic even in its aims of liberty. Oh my friends, how beautiful and powerful a thing is Liberty!…
“Friends, the Promised Land is a reality,” Considérant declared, indulging, as often, in fanciful biblical metaphors. “I did not believe it, I did not go to seek it, I was led there step by step. We have seen it and traversed it for forty days, and I have now described it to you. The redeeming idea sleeps in the captivity of Egypt. Let it awaken! Believe, and the land of realization, the Promised Land is yours. One strong resolution, one act of collective faith and this country is conquered. I bring you news of salvation, I show you the way and I propose the inauguration. Let us only unite in purpose, and little as the outside world may dream of it, the new social era will be founded.”
Considérant was an influential man, with followers all over the world. He soon raised more than a million francs, though far less than he had hoped, and colonists began making plans to become the workers of the future.
When Considérant arrived in New York in 1855, he discovered that the events on the ground in Texas had changed, as had the political climate. The rise of the Know-Nothing Party and the dramatic collapse of Icaria had generated a wave of newspaper-driven bigotry directed at the French colonists. The Texas State Gazette and The Texas State Times both denounced the colonists in advance, branding them “an armed band of seditious, lawless, foreign abolitionists” who “were seeking to sap the foundations of society.”
“The socialist is an abolitionist everywhere,” wrote another editor. “It is part of his creed.” Considérant was alarmed, so he published a pamphlet titled European Colonization in Texas, addressed to the people of the United States, in which he put forth his case. Shocked that a nation founded and composed so recently of immigrants should give rise to a party based on hostility to foreigners and immigration, he sought understanding.
“Now, as the human never shows itself absolutely illogical, even in the greatest errors,” he wrote, articulating one of the core principles of his political faith, “it is impossible, I said to myself, that in an enlightened country, in the midst of an intelligent population, a great party should be formed in absolute contradiction to the origin, the character, and the destiny of the country itself.”
Considérant went on to reason away the existence of the Know-Nothing Party and its fundamental platform, explaining gently but firmly the errors of fact and logic leading to its mistaken impressions of his enterprise, as well as the clear reasons why Know-Nothings, if they truly existed, far from being alarmed by the coming of a colony of French utopians, should welcome it with open arms.
The Know-Nothings of Texas, if they noticed his pamphlet, were not convinced. But they were the least of La Réunion’s problems. The lands Considérant had hoped to acquire from the State of Texas were occupied, and the homestead law he had counted on, which would have granted each settler 160 acres, with additional land available for fifty cents an acre, had been repealed. Land prices had inflated drastically. Charging ahead nevertheless, the colony was obliged to pay up to five dollars an acre for some poor land along the banks of the Trinity River.
In March 1854, thirty-three colonists—among them Swiss, Germans, Poles, and Alsatians—landed in Galveston with their luggage, trunks, and crates full of grape, peach, apple, pear, and other fruit tree cuttings that they imagined were unknown in Texas. Thirty-two days later, they arrived at La Réunion to find
one building with four rooms in which they were obliged to continue their camping life, albeit under a wooden roof. They set to work, attempting to garden under the hot Texas sun. Nothing grew. More colonists arrived, including Considérant. As their numbers swelled, so too did the opportunity for discord. The colony began to fail almost immediately.
As with Brook Farm and so many other utopian experiments, practical people—farmers and mechanics—were in short supply, and the colony was composed mostly of intellectuals, musicians, writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who were unprepared for the hardships they necessarily would face. Considérant’s hopes that Americans would join his European colonists were in vain. By the end of the summer, major investors were already pulling out. Some arrived to extract their investment personally.
European idealists were not well suited to withstand the harsh extremes of Texas weather. Their poorly built homes were too cold in the winter, and the summer heat was unbearable. Both 1855 and 1856 were drought years in Texas, and the colony’s spring dried up, requiring them to haul water.
One Polish colonist named Kalikst Wolski kept a diary and later published a book about his adventures in the New World. After a hard summer that ended with eight dead of fever, on September 1, 1855, Wolski was beginning to lose hope. “Here with us, want is beginning, and there is present already the prophesied lack of sugar and salt. For two days we have had no salt for our food, and had to drink our coffee and tea without sugar.”
Wolski also dreaded the “unpleasant visits of snakes, always crawling in uncounted numbers everywhere in this region.” Snakebites were apparently rather common, and the colonists made use of a folk remedy they had learned in Houston. “When the poisonous snake bites, it is necessary at once to suck the spot and so draw out the poison,” he wrote. “Then you must spread the spot with the gunpowder and burn it, after this covering it with a handkerchief soaked in ammonia. Finally, drink as much as you can hold of the whiskey, a whole bottle of it if you can.” For rattlesnake bites, the foregoing cure was useless, and death was almost certain, but for the smaller green snakes that were even more common, it worked splendidly, especially because they were not, in fact, poisonous.
On the other hand, Wolski very much enjoyed the literary salons hosted by Madame Julie Considérant, in which the colonists reclined in hammocks, listening to the pleasant harmonies of songbirds. “Often these gatherings lasted to a late hour, even until one or two in the morning, in the salon of that cedar grove where extraordinarily captivating and often highly erudite conversations went on, though more often the talk was of a light and witty nature, with anecdotes exchanged back and forth.”
How lovely! A pity they weren’t able to get any real work done, and too bad as well that Considérant and his Brook Farm wise men had chosen such poor land for the settlement. Apparently, they had thought it resembled wine country, but as it turned out, the soil was unsuitable for farming anything they might eat, such as corn or wheat or vegetables.
As with Icaria, the colony split into factions. Considérant grew depressed, medicating himself with whiskey and morphine, but somehow managed to purchase about sixty thousand acres near present-day Utopia, north of Uvalde. He considered suicide but instead wrote a book, titled Du Texas: Premier rapport à mes amis. The colony collapsed, leaving a tangle of lawsuits for the society’s board of directors. Considérant moved with his wife and mother-in-law to San Antonio and eventually returned to Paris, where he settled in the Latin Quarter.
La Réunion Cemetery, Dallas, Texas
The colonists fared much better. Many became leading citizens of Dallas. A number fought for the Confederacy. The former colonist Émile Remond bought some land near the colony and in the 1880s began making bricks and cement from deposits of chalk, limestone, and shale he found on the property. In 1900, a group of investors founded the Texas Portland Cement & Lime Company there; by 1908, the town of Cement City came into being to house workers for the plant. In 1935, Lone Star Cement bought the plant and expanded its operations, eventually consuming all the lands of the old French colony and demolishing the last of its buildings. Only the cemetery survived.
By 1970, the limestone was mined out and the plant shut down. In 1973, Rondel V. Davidson, America’s leading scholar of Considérant, described the old neighborhood around La Réunion in grim terms: “This territory now harbors an industrial park with all its pollution and a black ghetto complete with a de facto–segregated high school and a government housing project.”
I found the cemetery without much difficulty. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence, with locked gates, in the midst of a pleasant if nondescript and slightly shabby park. It was hard to imagine people actually doing anything in the park, but the same can be said for almost every park I’ve ever seen in Texas. Texans, for the most part, just don’t go to the park. Nearby was a tidy middle-class black neighborhood of brick ranch houses with white shutters and garage doors. Cedar fences enclosed backyards. I was reminded of my maternal grandparents’ almost identical neighborhood in Lubbock. Or my aunt and uncle’s street in Cleburne. Or someplace in east El Paso, if you subtract the grass. There was a high school nearby, and the kids were just getting out of school for the day. It was all rather peaceful.
I sat there for a long time. I could hear birds singing in the trees, and I thought of Kalikst Wolski and Julie Considérant, lounging in their hammocks, entertaining each other with witty stories and dreaming of a different future.
CHAPTER 4
BEYOND HERE LIES NOTHING
Texas has never been known for utopian projects, but they have always abounded here. Icaria and La Réunion are unmistakably utopian, but no less impractical and dreamy were the schemes of Sam Houston and the other founders of the Texas Republic. Today the utopian impulse can be seen in the capitalist fantasies of Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz and in the attempt to “secure” the Mexican border.
One day in early 2011, my grandmother, who was then in her ninetieth year, told me she had seen a drone flying above El Indio, a little hamlet south of Eagle Pass, during an outing with some of her friends. The newspapers that summer were filled with stories about the Predator drones that would soon be patrolling the skies above the Rio Grande, but the date of deployment was not yet at hand, and a Predator ordinarily flies far too high to be seen from the ground, so I decided to take the afternoon and investigate the mysterious white object my grandmother had spied that day.
As a lone male in a rented minivan bearing New Mexico plates driving down a remote stretch of Highway 1021, which tracks the South Texas borderline for one hundred desolate miles, I most definitely fit the profile. My first encounter with the Border Patrol came when I pulled off the road to study with my binoculars the white speck I could see high in the cloudless sky. It was not a Predator; it was a blimp. I put down my binoculars just as the Border Patrol pickup pulled up alongside. We both lowered our windows, and I asked, in my best Texan, what in the heck was floating up there in the sky.
“It’s a weather balloon,” he said with a smile.
Well, how about that, I said. I thanked the kind officer, and we both waved as I drove off, still headed south. When I got to El Indio, a village comprising a small white country store and a post office, I stopped to buy a Dr Pepper. I asked the little old lady behind the counter, in my poor Spanish, whether she knew anything about esa cosa blanca en el cielo, that white thing up in the sky. She declined to look me in the face and pretended that she couldn’t understand my primitive attempt to speak her language. I paid for my soft drink and thanked her.
I decided to inquire at the post office, but the window was closed. Just then, another minivan pulled up. I asked the lady driving the vehicle if she knew what that white thing was up in the sky.
“It’s a satellite for the drugs,” she said. “My brother-in-law works for it.”
Her son, or someone I took to be her son, chimed in from the backseat that if I kept driving south, I’d see “the buil
ding that controls it.” I thanked the nice family and continued on my way. As I drove, Border Patrol vehicles continued to pass me coming and going as before. They were as thick as flies. As I neared the base of what I could now see was a tethered blimp, a Border Patrol truck had come up right behind me and showed no sign of passing. Although I was doing nothing illegal, I began to sweat. Soon I passed a couple of midsized white buildings. In front was a sign on which I read the following: UNITED STATES AIR FORCE AEROSTAT RADAR FACILITY. Well, that settled the question. It was a radar blimp, and the nice family in El Indio was no doubt correct in their description of its mission. Having attained my goal of identifying the mysterious white object my grandmother and her friends had mistakenly thought was a Predator drone, I was now confronted with a dilemma: What was I to do about the Border Patrol vehicle that was so determinedly following me? I had never driven this highway before, and I feared I might drive for hours before reaching another human settlement. I spotted a place to pull over and decided to turn around. That’s when the flashing lights went on behind me.
Tethered radar blimps were deployed decades ago when drug smugglers were having a grand time flying over the border with their cargo. Some mild controversy exists about whether such assets are worth the investment, because the harsh Texas weather is said to keep them grounded much of the time. Many times I’ve driven past an almost identical aerostat in West Texas, near Marfa. Apparently, one of the blimps once got loose in a high wind and was blown almost to Oklahoma.
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