American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  That reconstruction would be broad in vision but local in application. He had “come to this country,” Owen said, “to introduce an entire new State of society; to change it from the ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system, which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all cause for contest between individuals.” The object would be to secure the “greatest amount of happiness” for Americans and their children “to the latest posterity.” No principle, he said, had “produced so much evil as the principle of individdualism. ” The competitive scramble alienated men from their work, their families, their communities—ultimately themselves. Economic and social inequality pitted one against the other, skilled workers against unskilled, employers against employee, farmer against operative. Harmony, association, cooperation—Owen always returned to this ideal. Somewhere in America he would realize it.

  Owen arrived in America as a celebrity. In New York, intellectuals, politicians, editors, and visionaries gathered around him to hear of his plan. He steamed up the Hudson to visit De Witt Clinton in Albany and to observe the Shaker establishment at Niskayuna. In Washington, he met President Monroe and Secretary of State Adams; lectured twice in the Hall of Representatives, with the nation’s most illustrious men arrayed in front of him; and on a return trip met Madison at Montpelier and Jefferson at Monticello—just a few months before the latter died. Meanwhile Owen traveled by stagecoach to Pittsburgh and by steamboat down the Ohio to Harmonie, which the Rappites had decided to abandon and for which he was negotiating. After surveying the Indiana village, with its 20,000 acres of woods and meadows, 180 houses of brick, frame, and log, and an assortment of shops and factories, the Englishman bought the whole settlement for $125,000. He renamed it New Harmony.

  By April 1825 enough people had crowded into the little village for Owen to draw up his constitution for the “preliminary society.” No matter that the newcomers comprised what Owen’s son Robert Dale would later call a heterogeneous collection of “radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in.” Good workers and craftsmen had arrived too, hopes were high, and spring was in the air. Under Owen’s constitution, he would direct the experiment for a year, after which the members would begin to take control. They would provide their own household goods and small tools, invest their capital in the venture at interest, and would be credited on the books with any livestock they might contribute.

  Reluctantly, Owen granted that there would have to be, for a time, “a certain degree of pecuniary inequality.” The society would advance each member a credit of fixed amount at the community store; at the same time, their daily labors would be computed and recorded, and they would be debited for goods consumed. All members were to render “their best services for the good of the society, according to their age, experience, and capacity,” but those who did not wish to work could buy credit by paying by cash in advance. Everyone, rich or poor, was enjoined to be “temperate, regular, and orderly,” and all were to have “complete liberty of conscience,” especially in religion.

  For a time, life was good in New Harmony. People worked—not always too hard—at plowing, planting, vine culture, storekeeping, carpentry, hat making, and other pursuits. In the long soft evenings on the Wabash, people discussed their experiment as they gathered on the benches in front of the village tavern. Concerts, dances, sermons, and lectures filled the evenings. Advanced ideas were discussed at meetings of the Female Social Society and the Philanthropic Lodge of Masons. Doubtless the intellectual highlight of the first year was the arrival of the keelboat Philanthropist, bringing Thomas Say, the zoologist; William Maclure, geologist and educator; and a miscellany of artists and educators.

  Above all, a heady feeling of toleration and liberty filled New Harmony. Visiting preachers of all persuasions vented their theologies in the village church, sometimes three on one Sunday. Maclure conducted exciting educational experiments in the classrooms. Owen welcomed the clash of ideas, and so did his followers. “I have experienced no disappointment,” William Pelham wrote. “I did not expect to find every thing regular, systematic, convenient—nor have I found them so. I did expect…to be able to mix with my fellow citizens without fear or imposition—without being subject to ill humor and unjust censures and suspicions—and this expectation has been realized—I am at length free—my body is at my own command, and I enjoy mental liberty, after having long been deprived of it.” A powerful sense of community and fraternity also pervaded New Harmony—and yet this noble venture was to last hardly more than a year.

  In part, it was the inevitable falling off of novelty and esprit as the relative ease of summer gave way to winter discomfort and illnesses; in part, disillusionment with the workings of the complex system of credits and debits. So many individual exceptions were allowed that the entire system became suspect. New Harmony failed, however, primarily in its pretensions toward equality. Owen himself, while always hazy on the matter, was no extreme egalitarian. His concept of equality did not extend to “persons of color,” who might be received in the association “as helpers, if necessary,” but in his view might better go off to Africa or elsewhere.

  Nor were all whites perceived as equal either. “No one is to be favored over the rest, as all are to be in a state of perfect equality,” wrote Mrs. Thomas Pears, reflecting the general sentiment of the community, but she went on to say in her very next sentence, “Oh, if you should see some of the rough uncouth creatures here, I think you would find it rather hard to look upon them exactly in the light of brothers and sisters.” This experiment in equality, Arthur Bestor concluded, had the paradoxical result of opening wide fissures in the community.

  Young men began to grumble over favoritism to older members. Arguments broke out over land boundaries, extreme egalitarians contending that no one should have any property at all; one of them, Paul Brown, opposed the very existence of bookkeeping and decided that Owen was nothing but a “speculator in land, power, influence, riches, and the glories of this world.” Owen remained steadfastly committed to the great ideal, but he was away during a critical seven months, and when he returned the community was already splitting up. In its genteel way, New Harmony ended as a single community not in a grand upheaval but in a series of secessions as evangelical Methodists, then better-off “English farmers,” and later young intellectuals, split away. Owen benignly granted land to the secessionists, but soon he too slipped away from the experiment he had founded.

  Thus New Harmony ended in disharmony. But it was not the end of Owen or his movement in America. Other Owenite communities were founded in Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania in the 1820s and 1840s. The establishment of communities of all sorts—Owenite, foreign-language sectarian, and religious—seemed to abate in the 1830s, as though Jacksonian leadership in the nation and states was absorbing reform energies. But in the 1840s came a spate of community founding, mostly by followers of an exotic philosophy spun out of the feverish imagination of a Frenchman named Fourier and imported by an American named Brisbane.

  Rarely has an intellectual leader seemed so unlikely to find followers as Charles Fourier. Born in Besançon in 1772 to a cloth merchant of small means and bourgeois aspirations, he grew up hating the commercial world of “chicanery and fraud” in which he was employed, despising later the revolutionaries who had ruined his financial prospects, and detesting the whole classical and rationalist heritage of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Living alone in poverty, a lifelong bachelor, he set himself, day after day and year after year, to expounding a philosophy of the passions. Into a series of enormous books lacking tables of contents, consecutive paging, or even any apparent order, he poured his views that men’s natural passions, arising out of deepest wants and needs, were fragmented, perverted, and crushed by bourgeois civilization. The more social institutions were made to respond to the true passions, he said, the more fulfilled and benign men would be.


  Fourier was controversial enough with his view that sex was a fundamental passion to be expressed in all its infinite variations, from partners of two to orgies of ten, from heterosexuality to homosexuality, in complex networks of liaisons. He founded his philosophy on a cosmology that linked the history of the passions to tens of thousands of years of human history, to a future epoch of immensely expanded degrees of passionate gratification, to such phenomena as the transformation of the salty seas into a tangy sort of lemonade—ideas that invested Fourier’s writings with an air of happy madness.

  Every day, precisely at noon, until his death, Fourier awaited the philanthropist who would agree to try out his system. No benefactor came. But one man who did come was Albert Brisbane, a young New Yorker who had studied Hegel in Berlin under the master himself, and dallied with the reformist ideas of Saint-Simon, until he discovered Fourier. After two years of indoctrination, Brisbane returned to America to propagate the faith. Fourierian wine lost some of its headiness in Brisbane’s importation. Purging the doctrine of such delightful fantasies as the fornication of the planets, Brisbane seized on his master’s detailed plan for Phalansteries, rural communes that would each allow their 1,600 members to live together in a harmonious, joyful, sensual life of love and passion.

  Brisbane preached Fourierism from lecture rostrums, through the columns of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and in books on “association” and the reorganization of industry. Even so, it is not wholly clear how and why this young idealist cut so deeply into popular minds and aspirations. Evidently people were responding to Brisbane’s emphasis on association as an escape from capitalistic competition, industrial disorder, and social disarray. We do know that at least a score of Fourierian associations, phalanxes, unions, and colonies were founded in townships and villages throughout the Northeast and Midwest—none in the South—between 1840 and 1847. One of these was Brook Farm, where Sophia Ripley had communed so happily on an earlier August day. Some, communities like Oneida lasted for a few decades, but most succumbed within a year or two.

  Why this record of failure? Critics pointed to mismanagement, poor planning, laziness, irresponsibility, thievery, fires and other catastrophes—and the inability of human nature to conform to the plans of Utopians. Others contended that communities stressing harmony, cooperation, sharing of profits and property, pastoral pursuits, agricultural produce, attention more to human needs than to human productivity, could not survive in a society tending more and more toward industrial productivity, urban growth, and competitive individualism.

  Like poor persons’ names in village graveyards, the demise of these societies was often their only act recorded in history. Lost to history also were many of the happier days of communal people who at least for a summer or two, until the mortgage callers and rent or tax collectors swooped down, had a taste of true brotherhood, genuine sharing, social and religious tolerance, individual and collective fulfillment. We know only enough about these communities to generalize modestly: they were the final product of brilliantly creative intellectual leadership that knew how to envision but not how to plan. They were rural in nature, arcadian in heritage and nostalgia, mainly agricultural in sustenance. They were self-consciously experimental. And, despite all their concern with harmony, they usually broke up in conflict, secession, and mutual hostility.

  It was a bitter denouement for the communitarians who had, in Horace Greeley’s admiring words, sought to achieve their goals not “through hatred, collision, and depressing competition; not through War, whether of Nation against Nation, Class against Class, or Capital against Labor; but through Union, Harmony, and the reconciling of all Interests, the giving scope of all noble Sentiments and Aspirations.…” It was precisely this aspiration of harmony, however, that was the target of criticism by a young German who had watched the communal experiments with interest. Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels lauded Owenites and Fourierians for their attacks on competitive capitalism, on the treatment of employees as mere commodities, on the alienation of the worker from his labor and its product. But, in a document that would become far more famous and influential than anything Fourier or Owen ever wrote, Marx and Engels excoriated the communitarians for their very belief in harmony and unity:

  “They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored,” Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. “Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class.…

  “Hence, they reject all political and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.…These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.”

  Class conflict, not communal harmony, was to Marx the driving social force in history, but neither Marx nor the harmonious anticipated the fundamental conflict that soon would rend American society.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Empire of Liberty

  T HE QUARTER CENTURY FOLLOWING the War of 1812-15 was an era of relative quiet in American foreign relations. The big powers across the Atlantic were relatively pacific, as though they were restoring energies lost in the carnage and chaos of the Napoleonic wars. The nation’s leaders rejoiced in the benignity of international affairs. “There has, indeed, rarely been a period in the history of civilized man in which the general condition of the Christian nations has been marked so extensively by peace and prosperity,” said President John Quincy Adams in 1825. Americans seemed preoccupied with domestic problems and opportunities—especially the vast lands to the west. Still, American war hawks repeatedly brought the country to a fever pitch against both France and Britain—and doubtless the jingoes would have challenged the third great European power, Spain, if Mexico had not gained its independence.

  The brush with France came close to comic opera. For years Washington had been trying to collect on claims against the French for American commercial losses during the French Revolution. Although in 1831 Paris finally agreed to pay, the French Finance Minister reneged on the first installment for the plausible reason that the legislature had not appropriated the necessary funds. A year later that body balked at paying at all. President Jackson—who had been compelled to stand by fuming as Biddle’s bank assessed his government $170,000 for having presented an unredeemed instrument—now exploded, shouting, so it is said, “I know them French”—he had never been abroad—“they won’t pay unless they’re made to.” He told Congress that if the money was not forthcoming the United States government should be authorized to seize French property. Chauvinistic excitement swept the nation. The French minister demanded his passport. The French legislature made the appropriation but withheld payment until the President explained his language.

  “Apologize? I’d see the whole race roasting in hell first!” was Jackson’s apocryphal reply. Jingoes had a field day. “No explanations! No apologies!”

  It was rumored that Jackson blew up when he saw a French note with the words je demande, not realizing that demande meant “request.” He ordered naval preparations. Paris assigned a squadron to the West Indies. By now the tiff had become so absurd as to fall of its own slight weight, and the British skillfully mediated. Jackson withdrew any possible imputation of insult to the French government in a way that enabled him to feel he had avoided apologizing. The French, their honor satisfied, arranged to pay the money. And the French chargé in Washington, Alphonse Pageot, who had indignantly departed for Paris with his little son, Andrew Jackson Pageot, returned triumphantly to Washington with his boy, name unchanged.

  The encounter with the British was more serious. In 1837 Canadians led by William Lyon Mackenzie rebelled against British rule. Nothing could be calculated to appeal more to the hearts and minds of Americans—to their memories of their own insurrection, their missionary hope of bringing
republicanism to their northern neighbors, the need of some for employment after the Panic of ’37. Incidents multiplied. Enlisting in the rebel cause, Americans raided United States arsenals and handed weapons over to their comrades. When they started to use a small steamship, the Caroline, to transport supplies to the insurrectionists, aroused Canadian loyalists rowed across the Niagara River, set the Caroline afire, and let it drift downstream. The ship had been sent over the falls with men trapped inside, American newspapers screamed. Actually the steamer had sunk above the falls, and only one man, Amos Durfee, had been killed, but this was enough. Durfee’s draped body was displayed in Buffalo. The Rochester Democrat demanded that the “outrage” be avenged “not by simpering diplomacy—BUT BY BLOOD.…”

  Within a year tens of thousands of Americans, it was estimated, were active across the border from Vermont to Michigan, with the avowed goal of emancipating “the British Colonies from British Thralldom.” Organized in “Hunters’ Lodges,” equipped with cryptic signs, passwords, and badges, the Hunters planned to invade Canada. Meantime, diplomacy had been at work. President Van Buren, as firm in dampening the war fever as the jingoes had been in inflaming it, demanded that American volunteers in Canada return home, asked the governors of New York and Vermont to call their militias into service, and sent General Winfield Scott to pacify the sympathizers. At the end of 1838 several armed bands crossed the border; they were quickly broken up. Rensselaer Van Rensselaer, an American “general,” was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for violating the neutrality laws. Van Buren pardoned him—but only after his defeat in the 1840 election.