By the early spring of 1841, Ripley and a handful of others were living and working at the farm, which they still rented. Their experiment, though not yet formally announced in any published prospectus, drew attention in the Boston area, and many visitors came either for the day or, as space permitted, boarded overnight, for which privilege they paid a nominal fee. Such prominent Transcendentalists as Elizabeth Peabody, Fuller, and Parker were among the first guests.
Ripley left it to Peabody to spread word of the community and its goals, which she did in a number of publications in 1841 and 1842. She based her reports on the sixteen “Articles of Agreement” to which the group attested.18 “In order more effectually to promote the great purposes of human culture,” Ripley wrote in the preamble,
To establish the external relations of life on a basis of wisdom and purity; to apply the principles of justice & love to our social organization in accordance with the laws of Divine providence; to substitute a system of brotherly cooperation for one of selfish competition; to secure to our children & those who may be entrusted to our care the benefits of the highest physical, intellectual, & moral education which in the present state of human knowledge the resources at our command will permit; to institute an attractive, efficient & productive system of industry; to prevent the exercise of worldly anxiety by the competent supply of our necessary wants; to diminish the desire of excessive accumulation, by making the acquisition of individual property subservient to upright & disinterested uses; to guarantee to each other forever the means of physical support & spiritual progress; & thus to impart a greater freedom, simplicity, truthfulness, refinement & moral dignity to our mode of life;—We the undersigned do unite in a voluntary Association, & adopt & ordain the following Articles of agreement & Association …19
Ripley’s idealistic formulation of the community’s goals called into question the moral as well as economic benefits of market capitalism and promised a more egalitarian society than the United States had yet realized. His fellow Brook Farm colleague, John Sullivan Dwight, put it this way. “Striving to love and draw near to” his neighbor, under present economic conditions man found himself in competition with him, so that one succeeds “by the other’s failing.” “All these individual wills,” he lamented, “born for harmony” but seeking it “by private paths that lead to private ends,” with private property now “the outward type and representative of individualism.”20
In her “Plan of the West Roxbury Community” in the January 1842 issue of The Dial, Peabody explained the new community’s organization. Brook Farm was a joint-stock company, with “subscribers”—that is, shareholders—guaranteed 5 percent annual interest on their investment and shares set at five hundred dollars each—no small amount. All members paid for room, board, fuel, lighting, and washing through directly proportionate labor, “one year’s board for one year’s labor; one-half year’s board for one-half year’s labor, and if no labor is done the whole board shall be charged,” four dollars per week. Men and women were paid at the same rate, and members chose what work most appealed to them. No particular job, no matter how menial, was coerced, because all labor was “sacred, when done for a common interest.” No one worked more than a ten-hour day, an enlightened idea for the time, or a six-day week. Members were guaranteed “medical attendance, nursing, education in all departments, amusements,” and everyone over the age of seventy or under ten, and anyone who was sick, had free board, unless they were shareholders whose 5 percent annual interest could support them. Students of nonmembers who attended the farm’s school paid on a sliding scale according to gender and age: boys over twelve paid four dollars a week for board and tuition, but girls paid five dollars (this later was equalized), and both boys and girls under this age paid three and a half dollars per week.
The community, Peabody explained, “aims to be rich, not in the metallic representative of wealth, but in the wealth itself, which money should represent,” that is, “LEISURE TO LIVE IN ALL THE FACULTIES OF THE SOUL.” Thus, in addition to supplying members with food, the farm provided them with “the elegances desirable for bodily and for spiritual health”—“books, apparatus, collections for science, works of art, means of beautiful amusement”—for these should be common to all. Concomitantly, because these alone “refine the passion for individual accumulation,” where all shared in the cultural resources, the “sordid passion” of selfishness would disappear. And what would pay for all this? Brook Farm promised such amenities because it would “traffic with the world at large” by marketing its surplus agricultural goods; commerce was on the increase as farms in towns surrounding Boston became essential to the metropolitan area’s food supply.
By the fall of 1841 ten subscribers, the aspiring writer Nathaniel Hawthorne among them, had pledged to purchase twenty-four shares of stock in the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education. Even though all the money was not in hand, Ripley contracted to purchase the Ellis farm and an additional parcel, including another house, barn, and outbuildings, for $10,500. By March 1842 the group had completed another domicile, the Eyrey, on a foundation of huge boulders. Several hundred yards behind the Hive, it housed Ripley’s library, a music room, and living quarters on the first and second floors. There were French windows on the first floor, with views over an orchard and land sloping to the Charles River on Brook Farm’s western boundary.
Although in its first two years Brook Farm was not a great monetary success, its population grew from about twenty to seventy by July 1842. Unfortunately, many of these were boarders or students who, while providing important income, were not fully committed to membership. Thus, although Ripley and others of the community’s prime movers felt compelled to construct new buildings to house these individuals, the whole population was not necessarily contributing to the agricultural labor of the enterprise or to the larger purpose of shared community.
As word of the institute spread in the local press as well as by word of mouth, it began to draw more and more visitors curious to see the Transcendentalists’ “Kingdom of God.” To accommodate this interest, Brook Farm charged overnight guests thirty-seven cents each, which included dinner, supper, and a night’s lodging; and “day-trippers” were welcomed as well, gratis. A conservative estimate suggests a remarkable eleven hundred visitors a year—“of all religions; bond and free; transcendental and occidental; antislavery and proslavery; come-outers; communists, fruitists [those who subsisted on fruit alone] and flutists; dreamers and schemers of all sorts”—who brought in income but did not contribute a day’s labor.21
In Brook Farm’s first two years, those who participated in its programs, whether as members or students, were virtually unanimous in their praise of its ideals and the ways in which Ripley sought to realize them practically. Labor was shared and varied according to one’s wishes, though it still fell primarily to the women to supervise the meals. Entertainment and enlightenment were available to all, with frequent picnics, evening lectures, concerts, dances, tableaux vivants, and an endless delight in punning and wordplay. These were not mere diversions, but went hand in hand with the effort to make Brook Farm an environment where the whole being, physical, mental, and spiritual, was cultivated.
Because Brook Farmers believed that their lofty social ideals should be inculcated early in life, the community’s school, housed in the Eyrey, always was central to its purpose and quickly became its most lucrative enterprise. Abigail Morton and the English governess Georgianna Kirby oversaw the infant section (children below the age of six). Marianne Ripley, George’s sister, supervised the primary classes (children between six and ten). She had some help from Sophia, who also worked with her husband in the “preparatory” school, where she taught history and modern languages and he taught mathematics and philosophy (using Victor Cousin’s works as the text). Charles A. Dana heard lessons in Greek and German, with Latin and music falling to John Sullivan Dwight, who had left his Northampton pulpit after a short time to join his mentor Ripley. Georg
e P. Bradford, a young Harvard graduate, supervised classes in belles lettres. By the second year, the students in all sections numbered thirty and represented many area families who were prominent intellectually or socially. The young scholars included Emerson’s nephew Frank Brown; Brownson’s son Orestes, Jr.; Parker’s ward, George Colburn; Charles Sumner’s younger brother, Horace; and Robert Gould Shaw, later to have a storied career in the Civil War as the leader of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts (black) Infantry. There even were some adult learners, most prominently George and Burrill Curtis, sons of a wealthy New York banker who had heard Emerson lecture in Providence; they took such subjects as German, music, and chemistry.
Because Brook Farm, unlike Hopedale, had no religious creed, members satisfied their spiritual longings variously. Some heard Parker in nearby West Newton, while others made the trip to Boston, where they had a choice of many prominent clergy. Still others communed with Brook Farm’s natural beauty or read, for Sunday was a day, one member recalled, “of recreation and enjoyment.”22 But religion was not banned on-site. Ripley, Dwight, and others often led discussions on spiritual topics of mutual interest, and visitors like Brownson and William Henry Channing could be counted on to initiate lively debate. But the true hallmark of this phase of Brook Farm’s history was its genuine catholicity. As the onetime Brook Farmer John Thomas Codman recalled, there one lived in “positive harmony” with all men. When one lay down at night he could unabashedly say, “I have wronged no man. I have worked for my race” on the “grand plan” that God intended.23 Most members and students agreed: at Brook Farm the quality of life was indeed different.
Social and cultural life went well at Brook Farm, but financially it struggled. By the end of 1842, for example, Ripley and other chief investors had to rethink its economic basis. Eager to welcome those interested in the community, Ripley had continued to construct new buildings, for which Brook Farm took out new mortgages totaling $6,300. But debt management and expenses began to outpace revenues. Some original investors, including Hawthorne, had already withdrawn and sought refund of their investment, as well as any yearly interest still owed. Around this time, proponents of Fourier’s elaborate blueprint for “Association” began to gain more of a hearing in New England generally and at Brook Farm in particular.
The American reformers’ infatuation with Fourier’s ideas marks one of the most significant transatlantic appropriations of European thought during the 1840s. Before Brisbane’s trip to France and his subsequent publication of The Social Destiny of Man, however, very few Americans (save Brownson, not surprisingly) had heard of Fourier. Fortunate enough to have received tutorials from the reticent master, Brisbane returned to the United States eager to convert people to Fourierism and, eventually, to build one of the Frenchman’s model communities.
Fourier was a remarkable autodidact whose works ranged through sociology, psychology, economy, architecture, and philosophy. Greatly underappreciated for most of his life, when Saint-Simon’s Christian socialism dominated reform efforts, Fourier struggled to publicize his ideas. Born in Besançon in 1772, the son of a successful cloth merchant, he went to school until he was sixteen and then worked in a variety of jobs—in a banking house in Lyons and a textile company in Rouen—always as a minor, and finally unsuccessful, functionary. Claiming a sizable patrimony, he invested it in the import trade in Lyon but lost it all in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which reduced him, as he put it, to “the jailhouse of commerce.”24 Never content with his work and frustrated by his inability to transcend it, he also was appalled at the monotony and waste that a free-market economy engendered.
While in a restaurant in Paris in the 1790s, he had an epiphany. Shocked to find that the price of one apple in the city could purchase a hundred in the country, he traced this economic conundrum to the inefficiency and waste of the current market system. That apple, he wrote, was one of four that changed history. “Two were famous by the disasters they caused, that of Adam and that of Paris, and two by services rendered to mankind, Newton’s and my own.”25 Beginning in 1808 with his Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales, Fourier published a number of remarkable works, most notably his Traité de l’association domestique-agricole; Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire; and La Fausse industrie, in which he analyzed the economic and psychological shortcomings of his age and discovered what he believed were universal laws that governed individuals’ relations to one another and to God.
It is impossible to provide a synopsis of these lengthy tomes. They begin, however, from the premise that humanity had greatly harmed itself through an enthusiastic and uncritical embrace of an economic system that privileged the individual at the expense of the whole. Plotting humanity’s eighty-thousand-year evolution through various stages, including its current one, defined by greed and waste, Fourier believed that humanity would progress through two more stages to a state of complete natural and spiritual “Harmony.” His was an all-encompassing world program, not a mere blueprint for economic reform.
Fourier proposed that his contemporaries build and inhabit “phalansteries,” cooperative communities each with 1,620 residents, in which all aspects of personal life were organized on his theory of the “passions”—that is, the instinctive, nonrational parts of the self that demand gratification. In its current state, society repressed what people most desired, contributing to existential malaise. On the contrary, in each phalanstery man’s twelve basic passions would be balanced and gratified. Fourier derived his magic number of 1,620 individuals in each phalanstery from his belief that there were 810 possible personality types, given the various combinations of passions. With twice that number of people, everyone would at some time or other be attracted to (that is, wish for the good of) every other of his or her fellow phalansterians.
Each “phalanx,” the group who lived in a phalanstery, thus comprised a variety of individuals in terms of backgrounds and skills, all of whose basic needs were supplied in common—provided a “social minimum” as Fourier put it—because of the increased production incumbent on cooperative labor, even as different jobs yielded different dividends, depending on their difficulty and desirability. In a phalanstery, men and women practiced “attractive industry,” individuals rotating through different occupations and acquiring new skills and competence, thus sealing their interest in their fellow workers and the good of the entire unit. The end of this social engineering would be an Earth planted with two million phalansteries, connected so that nation-states, another hallmark of present vanity and selfishness, became unnecessary.
Thoughts of the age of Harmony inspired Fourier to astonishing flights of fantasy. In civilization, he claimed, the very Earth had been thrown from cosmic alignment, affecting its relation to other planets and stars. In Harmony, it would realign, and mankind would see such wondrous sights as five many-colored moons in the evening sky. Indeed, Fourier believed that celestial bodies themselves were sentient and that they copulated to create new worlds. Drawing on Franz Mesmer’s notion of magnetic fluids or “aromas” that circulated in our bodies and could be therapeutically polarized through magnetism, Fourier posited an aroma circulating through culture itself that determined a people’s state of development. When Earth’s proper balance and sexual vitality were restored through harmonial association, disease would be unknown; the climate would warm until the far northern oceans were like the Mediterranean; new species of animals, loving and kind, would replace savage beasts; and the oceans would turn to lemonade. Even humanity’s appearance would be altered as people again grew tails from their prehensile stubs and reveled in a guiltless, prelapsarian harmony. Fourier’s French acolytes, as well as his American followers, downplayed these more extravagant features of his social and cosmological visions, emphasizing instead his radical economic critique so that he became best known for his theory of “Attractive Labor.” But Fourier’s state of Harmony cannot be understood without this spiritual component.
U
ntil the 1850s, readers in England and the United States most frequently encountered Fourier’s ideas through Brisbane’s redactions. Beginning in March 1842, for example, another sanitized version of his thought was widely available. An infant Fourier Association in New York had encouraged Brisbane to proselytize through the burgeoning newspaper press. For five hundred dollars he purchased a front-page column in Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune and for a year and a half explained and extolled Fourier’s economic and social vision. As Greeley’s paper gained popularity and influence, its contents were reprinted in many other papers, so that thousands of Americans (including Brook Farmers) became conversant with Fourier’s ideas. When Brisbane issued some of his daily columns as a pamphlet, A Concise Exposition of the Practical Part of Fourier’s Social Science, it sold ten thousand copies.
After the publication of The Social Destiny of Man, Fourier’s system became a common topic of discussion among the Transcendentalists, nowhere more so than at Brook Farm, where Ripley continued to cast about for some way to improve the community’s financial position. He began to require a more detailed accounting of each individual’s contribution to the workforce, but to no avail. In addition, there were continued defections from the community, prompting Greeley and even Sophia Ripley to wonder if Brook Farm’s membership had not become too exclusive. She “mourned” what she termed the community’s “prodigality” and selfishness. “I see everywhere around me,” she wrote, those who prophesy “only of themselves, casting their horoscopes, impertinently prying into their own emotions, or intoxicating themselves with the excited emotions of others.” They were “wrapped and swathed in selfism [sic].”26 Emerson concurred; at Brook Farm there was “no authority.” Each was “master and mistress of their [sic] own actions—happy hapless Sansculottes” (the poorer, radicalized element of the population during the French Revolution).27
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