Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Ironically, the most dependable assistance that was offered to the Lanes and Alcotts came from a man who never formally joined the community. He was Joseph Palmer, described by Anna Alcott as “the old farmer who plowed the sacred soil.” Palmer, as if to add another lightly surreal touch to the community, hailed from a place called No Town, so named because it lay outside the limits of any municipality and was thus exempt from local taxation. Like Bower and Everett, Palmer was attracted to Fruitlands as a haven from the persecutions and judgments with which the world had pursued him. Palmer’s offense against society had been wearing a beard. For the crime of being twenty years ahead of popular fashion, he had been jeered at, physically assaulted, and even refused Communion at church. Once, when he was set on by a group of men intent on holding him down and shaving him, Palmer had taken out a knife and stabbed one of them. For this act of self-defense, he was sent to jail, where he had to defend his beard again, this time against fellow inmates. Years after these events, when facial hair had become popular, Palmer met a preacher who had once denounced Palmer’s beard from the pulpit. Palmer walked up to the man and stroked the latter’s whiskers with his hand, murmuring, “Know ye that thy redeemer liveth?”6 Palmer’s experiences had led him to sympathize with others who were willing to suffer for principle. He brought the Alcotts furniture for the house and offered his labor for no pay. Whenever—and it was often—the Fruitlanders found that they lacked the right tools for a job, Palmer would drive to No Town and return with the required item.

  Three days after arriving, once the rest of the furniture had come and she felt entitled to a few moments of leisure, Abba took a walk around the property, taking note of “woodland, vale, meadow, and pasture.” She enthusiastically declared the view to be “one of the most expansive prospects in the country.” All her worries vanished. Delight and confidence enfolded her. In the drawing rooms of Concord, perhaps, she had doubted Emerson when he proclaimed the sovereignty of Nature and smiled at her own husband’s ecstatic immersion in the Over-soul. Here, on this hillside, however, all of it seemed undeniably real. While the impressions were still fresh, she hastened to her journal:

  One is transported from his littleness and the soul expands in such a region of sights and sounds. Between us and this vast expanse we may hold our hand and stand alone, an isolated being occupying but a foot of earth and living but for ourselves; or we may look again, and a feeling of diffusive illimitable benevolence possesses us as we take in this vast region of hill and plain.7

  After her glorious experience of beauty on the hillside, it was soon time to descend again to house and kitchen. Later that same day, she was back in the realm of practicality, “gather[ing] an apron of chips while the children collected flowers.” Abba mused briefly on the apt nature of the two kinds of collecting. “Like provident Mother Earth I gathered for use, they for beauty. Both gave pleasure. It was very characteristic in me, and most natural in them.”8

  Everyone agreed on the natural beauty of the farm. The improvements were another matter. Ironically for a settlement called Fruitlands, the property possessed only a scattering of fruit trees. When one of the community members, Isaac Hecker, resigned from the group, he cited the lack of fruit as one of his reasons; he considered himself a victim of false advertising. In a letter published in The Dial, written by Alcott and Lane with the general intention of promoting the project, the co-founders themselves felt bound to admit that the existing buildings were “ill-placed and unsightly as well as inconvenient.” They meant to use them only until “suitable and tasteful buildings in harmony with the natural scene” could be erected.9 Containing only three bedrooms, one of which was initially set aside for guests or for “family” members other than the Alcotts and Lanes, the house was a cramped accommodation for the eight new occupants.

  The complaints in The Dial piece notwithstanding, the house’s simplicity was not devoid of charm. Walking through the front door, one entered a parlor where Lane and the Alcotts received both friends and curious visitors. To one’s immediate left was the moderately sized room where Alcott at once established the commune’s library and where his ever-present bust of Socrates glowered down on the well-stocked shelves and simple chairs. Whereas a spirit of Spartan self-denial reigned over the rest of Fruitlands, this small Temple of Minerva merited at least a partial exemption. It was said that the principal property of the community consisted in books. Louisa asserted in retrospect that the library was indeed “the best room in the house, and the few busts and pictures that still survived many flittings were added to beautify the sanctuary.” It was here, she remembered, that the family met “for amusement, instruction, and worship.”10 In back of the two front rooms, with which it shared an enormous central fireplace, lay a single large room in which the consociates took their meals.

  In the right rear, a narrow stairway led upstairs, where a wide landing gave access to the three bedrooms, the first two of which looked out from the front of the dwelling. The first of these Charles Lane shared with his son, although the word “shared” suggests a more generous arrangement than existed in fact, since the elder Lane actually claimed the entire room proper for himself. The luckless William was shunted off into an adjoining space no larger than a walk-in closet. The adjacent bedroom housed Alcott and his wife. Three-year-old May, judged too young to sleep on her own, shared her parents’ quarters. A third bedroom, very small and located at the far end of the landing, accommodated other members of the commune or curious visitors, of whom there were many. Any visitor interested in seeing how a preadolescent girl lived in the new Eden would have been conducted, perhaps with some apologies, to the dark flight of stairs that communicated with the attic. It was not a cheery place. The only natural light entered through two small windows at either end, and the ceiling was so low that it is unlikely that either of the two older girls was able to stand upright. The space also trapped an unpleasant amount of heat. In her Fruitlands journal, in reference to the bracing predawn baths that were part of the daily routine, young Louisa wrote ecstatically, “I love cold water!”11 Given the stifling repose from which she had just risen, it is easy to see why.

  No record survives of the first day of work on the Fruitlands farm. However, the likely spirit of the moments before the first spade of earth was turned can perhaps be guessed from a later entry in the journal of Isaac Hecker. Although Hecker did not join the colony until July, he was on hand for another significant “first”: the reaping of the first crops harvested by the community. He wrote, “When the first load of hay was driven into the barn and the first fork was about to be plunged into it, one of the family took off his hat and said, ‘I take off my hat, not that I reverence the barn more than other places, but because this is the first fruit of our labor.’ Then a few moments were given to silence, that holy thought might be awakened.”12 The scene on June 2 had probably been very much the same. Alcott, with his love of speech and ceremony, must have had more than a few well-chosen words to say. Heads were likely bared as the calm, even voice, imbued on this day with unique passion and purpose, wafted on the late spring breeze. The newly united family may have paused a few moments, wishing to experience in all its depth and expectation this moment when, they hoped, the history of humankind was to begin its transformation. Then it was time to begin.

  More than two months after their arrival at Fruitlands, Alcott and Lane wrote a jointly composed letter to A. Brooke of Oakland, Ohio, who had been sufficiently intrigued by the experiment to ask them for a further description. The two founders admitted, “We have not yet drawn out any preordained plan of daily operations.” They hastened to explain that this lack of rigor was not a sign of laxness, but rather a natural consequence of the community’s philosophy, which held that the form of activity should derive from the inspirations of the soul, not some inflexible blueprint. “We are impressed,” they asserted, “with the conviction that by a faithful reliance on the spirit which actuates us, we are sure of attaining to clear revelat
ions of daily practical duties.” They added, “Where the spirit of love and wisdom abounds, literal forms are needless, irksome, and hindrative; where the spirit is lacking, no preconceived rules can compensate.”13

  These pious sentiments were not entirely truthful; there were plenty of rules at Fruitlands, and enough structure to go with them for Lane and Alcott, in their letters to the outside world, to describe a daily routine. After the morning bath, the children assembled for music and singing lessons, conducted by Lane. Then came breakfast, after which the men went out to the fields, but not in the typical work clothing of the period. The basic principle of the farm—that the people who lived there would cause no avoidable harm to man or beast—had a profound influence on the acceptable wardrobe. Leather belts and shoes would be accepted only until a nonexploitative substitute could be discovered; the Fruitlands farmers experimented with wearing canvas on their feet, and there was talk of finding some kind of tree bark that could be made to serve. Wool clothing was an act of theft against sheep; cotton had been raised and picked by slaves. Therefore, both were excluded. Linen, however, raised no moral objections. Thus, when the Fruitlands men went to their work, they wore loose fitting, smocked linen tunics, designed by Alcott himself and bearing some resemblance to the bloomers that would later be sported by suffragettes.

  Much of the work in the early days of Fruitlands involved planting the fields as rapidly as possible. Already ominously behind schedule, the men were further hindered by the strict principles they tried to impose on themselves. Their initial hope had been to use no animal labor whatsoever. However, it seems that Alcott had forgotten, and Lane had never known, how quickly middle-aged muscles can tire and blisters can emerge on hands that, to use Louisa’s phrase, “had held nothing heavier than a pen for years.”14 After a few days of noble striving, it was reluctantly agreed that a yoke of cattle was needed to plow the land. In allowing themselves this luxury, Lane and Alcott pleaded strict necessity to the outside world. In their initial exertions, they wrote, “we have at the outset…encounter[ed] struggles and oppositions somewhat formidable. Until the land is restored to its pristine fertility…the human hand and simple implement cannot wholly supersede the employment of machinery and cattle.”15 However, they left no doubt that they would resume working exclusively with their own hands as soon as possible. To supply the oxen for the plow, the consociates turned to Palmer, who sagely used the opportunity to import a source of protein; instead of bringing two oxen, as promised, Palmer arrived with an ox and a cow, whose milk proved to be a handy supplement in later months. As Louisa remembered, the planting efforts were chaotic; three of the brethren, each acting independently, sowed the same field with a different grain; after consultation and a good deal of laughter, the commune decided to do nothing to correct the error, which could not be remedied in any event, and “see what would come of it.”16

  After the morning work, the family members gathered for what Lane liked to call, somewhat ornately, “the meridian meal,” an occasion “when usually some interesting and deep-searching conversation gives rest to the body and development to the mind.” The afternoons differed little from the mornings:

  Occupation, according to the season and the weather, engages us out of doors or within, until the evening meal,—when we again assemble in social communion, prolonged generally until sunset, when we resort to sweet repose for the next day’s activity.17

  If the meals at Fruitlands were served in modern prisons, they might support a complaint of cruel and unusual punishment. Not content to outlaw animal products, Lane and Alcott banned salt, cane sugar, spices, coffee, and tea as well. The most exotic flavoring permitted was maple sugar. The list of forbidden substances left virtually no room for creativity or variation. Louisa recalls, in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” the numbing monotony of the menu: “Unleavened bread, porridge, and water for breakfast; bread, vegetables, and water for dinner; bread, fruit and water for supper.” The Fruitlanders consumed hefty quantities of potatoes, dried fruit, peas, beans, and barley, all of which Abba struggled to make palatable. As Louisa recalled, no beast was sacrificed on the domestic altar, but “only a brave woman’s taste, time, and temper.”18

  Despite the rough beginning, Alcott was able to report to his brother Junius on June 18 that he and his fellow pilgrims had finished the planting and pruning. Three acres of corn, he wrote, were almost ready for the hoe, in addition to two acres of potatoes and one of beans. An acre or two more were being prepared for barley, turnips, and carrots. In mid-June, Lane wrote that Alcott himself was “doing a thousand things.” This description says much about Alcott’s enthusiasm for the project. To make it work, it seems, Alcott needed to be in several places at once, and Alcott was indeed desperate to make it work. But Alcott’s “doing a thousand things” may also suggest a seldom-discussed reason for the commune’s eventual failure. For all his talk about the shared burdens and blessings of a consociate family, the Fruitlands farm remained for Alcott an intensely personal project. It appears that every endeavor that took place on the farm required his personal involvement; even where the work was shared, it needed to bear the stamp of his own individual effort. If Fruitlands was to be a Utopia, it was to be a Utopia as strictly defined by Messrs. Alcott and Lane.

  At its high-water mark, the Fruitlands venture could claim no more than sixteen members. The smallness of the community, obviously, was a tremendous problem, but one wonders whether a community can be large enough to sustain itself and still call itself utopian. Emerson put the matter with a clearheaded succinctness and more than a touch of mockery:

  It takes 1680 men to make one Man, complete in all the faculties; that is, to be sure that you have got a good joiner, a good cook, a barber, a poet, a judge, an umbrella-maker, a mayor and aldermen, and so on. Your community should consist of 2000 persons, to prevent accidents of omission; and each community should take up 6000 acres of land. Now fancy the earth planted with fifties and hundreds of these phalanxes side by side,—what tillage, what architecture, what refectories, what dormitories, what reading rooms, what concerts, what lectures, what gardens, what baths!19

  Emerson realized that a social group of the size needed to sustain itself could not honestly call itself a “family”: it was a small town. He also saw that a world filled with such earnest and inward-looking small towns, each isolated from the others by its own parochial ideology, would never achieve the economies of scale necessary to produce a paradise of culture. The new Eden, if it were ever to be built, would require diversity and size. Yet the community that Alcott had had in mind demanded both personal intimacy and almost perfect philosophical consensus. How, though, was it possible to have a community as large as the one Emerson thought necessary, in which all the members were intellectually in agreement? Charles Lane, it seemed, was hard-pressed to decide whether it was more important to have enough hands to do the work or to keep the commune ideologically pure. On the one hand, when he wrote to William Oldham at Alcott House, he urged him to “please advertise [the colony] to all youthful men and women, for such are much wanted here.” On the other, he also asserted, “The value of our enterprise depends not upon numbers so much as upon the spirit from which we can live outwardly.”20

  The most impressive yield at Fruitlands was its luxuriant crop of words. When Alcott and Lane were not working to sustain the farm, they were writing. Alcott and Lane produced a variety of essays about the farm that were partly manifestos and partly solicitations. This was one of the paradoxes of Fruitlands: the community wished to be both removed from the corrupting world and yet highly visible to it. Isaac Hecker thought one of the farm’s best points was its delightful solitude. But if it were to change the world, Fruitlands was also dependent on the public eye. In a gesture tending to reflect their singleness of purpose, Alcott and Lane acquired the practice of signing both their names to their essays, but it seems evident that they were primarily Lane’s. Though Alcott still had great confidence in himself as a social the
orist, Emerson’s criticisms of his “Psyche” manuscript and the poor public reception of “Orphic Sayings” had punctured his self-assurance as a writer. He realized that Lane’s terser style was preferable to his own rhapsodic digressions.

  The spirit of restraint was evident not only in the tone of Lane’s writing but also its content. Almost everything Lane wrote at Fruitlands is laden with a heavy spirit of negation and self-denial. He had a gift for making his Utopia sound sanctimoniously joyless, as in the following passage written in August:

  “Shall I sip tea or coffee?” the inquiry may be. No. Abstain from all ardent, as from alcoholic drinks. “Shall I consume pork, beef, or mutton?” Not if you value health and life. “Shall I stimulate with milk?” No. “Shall I warm my bathing water?” Not if cheerfulness is valuable…. “Shall I teach my children the dogmas inflicted on myself, under the pretense that I am transmitting truth?” Nay, if you love them, intrude not between them and the Spirit of all Truth.21

  The pious litany of forbidden actions draws on still further. Shall the Fruitlands disciples become hirelings or hire others? Shall they subjugate cattle? Shall they trade? Shall they become parents? Shall they take an interest in politics? To all these questions, the Fruitlanders returned the same answer, a single word boldly printed in capital letters: “ABSTAIN.” The core of reform, at least for Charles Lane, lay not in doing, but rather in refraining from doing. Americans as a people have always inclined toward action; our response to a problem is far more likely to be “What should we do?” instead of “What should we cease to do?” In advocating less rather than more, Lane and Alcott sounded a note that was seldom heard in public discourse in their own time, and which is even less audible today.