The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  “When Rapp the Harmonist embargoed Marriage

  In his religious settlement (which flourishes

  Strangely enough as yet without miscarriage,

  Because it breeds no more mouths than it nourishes,

  Without those sad expenses which disparage,

  What Nature naturally most encourages)

  Why called he ‘Harmony’ a state sans wedlock?

  Now here I’ve got the preacher at a deadlock.

  “Because he either meant to sneer at Harmony,

  Or Marriage, by divorcing them thus oddly;

  But whether reverend Rapp learned this in Germany

  Or no, ’tis said his sect is rich and godly,

  Pious and pure, beyond what I can term any

  Of ours, although they propagate more broadly.

  My objection’s to his title, not his ritual,

  Although I wonder how it grew habitual.”

  The unnatural sexual life of the Rappites had, then, two sources: the very beginning of creation and the end of life. The beginning gave it authority in the story of Adam and the end gave it purpose: it was only the Second Coming that could make celibacy natural and desirable. Father Rapp expected this event from day to day. The stored up money was reserved to be used at the very end when the whole Society would be again uprooted and taken to Palestine to greet the Redeemer. A few rather trivial commands from God are ascribed to Rapp—as for instance the plan of Economy and particularly that he should build a certain house in the shape of a Greek cross—but the divine communications upon which he laid the utmost stress were those which seemed to promise the coming of Christ in Rapp’s own lifetime.

  It is the intensity of this belief that makes the Society’s one great schism, alluded to above, noteworthy. Hospitality was carried to an extraordinary extent by the Rappites: a visitor once counted twenty tramps who were fed, lodged, and given breakfast, without any conditions except that the tramp be not a professional beggar. But on an occasion when the Society opened its doors to one who claimed to have “special illumination in spiritual things,” it came close to disaster. Economy was then an important town; it had cheap water-routes and lay on a main stage-line, and its fine inn made it a natural stopping place for travelers. Its integrity in business had given it a great market, and there was still sufficient young blood, as a survivor later told the publicist, Charles E. Nordhoff, to give the required energy to trade and manufacture. Its prosperity was in flood; the members sang songs every day and made music every evening. In short, with its prosperity and its simplicity, it invited the charlatan.

  He came, announcing himself as Count Maximilian de Leon, “the Ambassador and anointed of God, of the stem of Judah, of the root of David.” These credentials were set forth in a letter written by himself—his real name was Bernhard Müller—and were never questioned. He had already collected some forty disciples, two of whom he had sent ahead, to prepare for his coming, while he rested in Pittsburgh. Rapp, who had been flattered by the Count’s preliminary correspondence and had so often preached of the coming of One, planned a magnificent reception. “As soon as the coach approached the town it was greeted with a salute of the finest music from the band stationed on the tower of the church. The Count was met at the hotel and escorted to the church, where the whole Community were assembled awaiting his arrival. He enters in state, attended by his Minister of Justice, in full military garb and sword at his side. He is shown into the pulpit by Mr. Rapp, and all eyes are fixed upon him and all ears are open. He expresses the belief that this meeting is the most important since the creation, and that henceforth all the troubles and sorrows of the Lord’s people will cease.”

  This was late in 1831, the colony having been settled only six years in its new home. The new recruits made a welcome addition, but Rapp soon discovered that Count de Leon, who was continually reading to him from a Golden Book of doctrine, had ideas far removed from the asceticism of his own principles. The Count suggested better food and clothing, livelier gatherings, and, surprisingly, the toleration of marriage. It was obvious that the impostor would have to be expelled, but Rapp hesitated to turn the Leonites out in the midst of winter. By the next spring, the Count had acquired so large a following that they could call for a vote between Rapp and Leon. The Society, then at its maximum of 750, divided two to one in favor of the old believers but, before the dissenters could be dispossessed, the Society had to give them notes amounting to over $100,000. With this money—which was promptly paid, a proof of the Society’s financial strength—the Leonites founded a communistic society, with marriage. It failed miserably and, after an attempt to extort more money from Father Rapp, Count de Leon vanished for a time and presently died of cholera.

  So ended the Rappites’ unique fling in Messianic delusions. It did not discourage them. On his death-bed, still confident, Rapp said, “If I did not so fully believe that the Lord has designed me to place our Society before his Presence in the land of Canaan, I would consider this my last day.” It was; but the Society continued to live in his faith; and when a visitor, mournfully looking over the closed factories and unoccupied houses of Economy after the members had almost all died out, asked whether there was no monument anywhere to the founder, an old man, wholly unaware of a more famous use of the words, answered simply, “This, all that you see here, around us.”

  [1] “Groceries” generally signified anything purchased at a store—“boughten goods” as opposed to those raised on the farm.

  [2] The steamer, which was toasted in Wabash wine was named William Penn, and with the Bolivar and other boats, ferried the entire group to their new home.

  [3] All the authorities on the Rappites agree that celibacy was a fundamental tenet and an observed practice. But there is a curious note to the passage in Don Juan quoted below which asserts that the colony (still flourishing when the note was written) “does not entirely exclude matrimony,” but imposes restrictions to prevent “more than a quantum of births within a certain number of years” and these births, according to the author of Hints to Emigrants, arrive “in a little flock like those of a farmer’s lambs, all within the same month perhaps.” It is likely that complete abstention from sexual intercourse was not imposed upon the Rappites at the beginning of the experiment; by 1807 it was being warmly supported and gradually became the fixed and, as far as I have found, the universally observed rule of the community. I may note here that to avoid confusion I have omitted mention of the very first stopping place of the Rappites at Harmony, in Butler County, Pennsylvania; everything essential developed in the more substantial colonies at Harmony and at Economy.

  † William Cobbett, the Englishman, knew the wild strawberry and considered the cranberry “the finest fruit for tarts that ever grew.” † The property qualification for voters was gradually dropped. † A family of fourteen lived comfortably on $3,000 a year in a large city and, until 1825, there was no stock market in New York. After that “when the members are assembled the president proceeds to call the list and, as each stock is named in succession, those who have orders to buy and sell make their offers, and the transactions are recorded (and) become binding upon the members.”

  † The Americans were becoming the best shipbuilders in the world, but the frontier still held its own. It was considered an impropriety to shoot a squirrel or turkey anywhere except in the head. † Noah Webster’s Elementary Speller was the accepted standard and Lindley Murray’s grammar was displacing The Ladies’ Accidence as a text-book. † It was proposed to transfer the remains of Washington to Richmond in which city the bust of Lafayette had been mutilated. The capitol at Washington was being repaired after the ravages of the war and nineteen marble capitals had been imported from Italy to crown its columns. † By five o’clock in the morning the markets and stores of Cincinnati were crowded. † The word “elegant” meant eligible or useful. † In Pennsylvania, barns as well as houses were of stone and, throughout the East, even in winter, wagoners drove without gloves
. † Broccoli had been introduced and the tomato accepted. † English visitors missed singing birds and honeysuckle, daisies, primroses, bluebells, and daffodils. † Chocolate was cheap enough even to be used by slaves; raisins and currants were imported from the Levant. † Men were addressed by their full names without title. Children of tender years tipped off drams. † On the westward trek it was said that New Englanders walked in front of their wagons, Jersey people sat within, and Pennsylvanians crept reluctantly behind. Twelve thousand wagons passed between Baltimore and Philadelphia in one year. Taverns improved as one went westward but there were still too many “hot rooms and swarming beds”; tips were not expected.

  VI. —And the Old Adam.

  THE Adamic Rappite had barely quitted the soil of his Eden when it was occupied in force by the Old Adam, lusting for pleasure, experimenting in sexual relations, and convinced that the millennium was coming—not with the second advent of Christ, but with the liberation of man from his unnatural servitudes. New Harmony was bought by Robert Owen who, after addressing the House of Representatives in terms a little offensive to solid citizens, invited all men of good will to participate in his new experiment. The paternalistic Communism of New Lanark, in Yorkshire, had proved a success. No sooner had Owen’s call gone out, than the inspired and the shiftless began to crowd their way into New Harmony. Presently they overran the tidy German streets and so overcrowded the inn and the church that immigration had to be checked until some sort of order could be established. A few men of parts—a pioneer among women agitators, an enthusiast for new methods in education—gathered about Owen; but the general run was disappointing. Owen had succeeded with his own people, a homogeneous body whose life was parallel to his own. He hoped to repeat the experiment in conditions totally different, with men strange to him in habit of mind, and only held together by their aversion to the current system of society. The colonists were repellent particles and Owen, with his countless schemes, plans, foibles, interests, and experiments was not powerful enough to hold them together. Owen was, in fact, neither excessively interested in New Harmony, nor extremely radical. He considered private property a curse, but he did not think that man was ready for entire communal ownership. He kept title to New Harmony in his own hands, but allowed the colonists to use the land, and established equality in rank and payment.

  Dissensions began almost as soon as work began. Religious differences—Owen ranked organized religion with private property as one of the curses of humankind—separated the settlement into inharmonious groups attempting to exist independently. Yet Owen allowed them to remain on his land. There was, among these idealists and forerunners of Heaven on earth, a strong impulse of snobbery. Certain foreigners were not considered suitable associates by the more lofty members. There was racial hostility and a measure of spiritual condescension. The people hated a great deal of the necessary work. Although the factory buildings of the Rappites remained, the New Harmonists could grow enthusiastic only over the land—not the actuality of farming, but the idyllic picture of a happy (and intellectual) peasantry drawing sustenance from the great breast of Mother Earth, discussing the laws of chemistry or Platonic love while they gently weeded a vegetable patch, and singing behind the cows as they drove the herd in for the milking at sunset. This picture was to recur hundreds of times in the minds of American colonists. Whatever had to do with the land was natural, healthy, beautiful, sacred. Almost all colonists suffered from this form of mother-worship, but the most intelligent of them, we shall see, saw through it and founded his community not on land, but on factories. Owen’s was the hungriest of the land hungry colonies—in a country where there was too much land, where machinery was destined to become the supreme agent of progress!

  New Harmony was only an episode in the life of Owen. It was only a forerunner in the history of American communities. It lasted three years; and that, significantly enough, is far above the average. In Noyes’ record of colonies founded on the Owenite model, we find that they lasted “a short time,” “three months,” “five months,” and only Macluria, which was virtually a part of the original Owenite colony, lasted as long as two years. The corporate mortality was shocking and, with each bankruptcy, revolution, or dispersal, a share of high human hopes was lost. The break-up of New Harmony is important because it foreshadowed so many other disasters.

  In part, the failure of New Harmony was due to the violent character of Owen himself; in part, to the stupidity and unfairness of his adversaries. He had issued from the pit of hell—the English factory under the benevolent system of laissez faire—and he genuinely hated property and wage-slavery. As honestly he hated other things, and was determined to abolish them all at one blow. “I now declare to you and to the world, that Man, up to this hour has been in all parts of the earth a slave to a Trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon his whole race. I refer to Private or Individual Property, Absurd and Irrational systems of Religion, and Marriage founded on individual Property, combined with some of these Irrational systems of Religion.”

  So, in two sentences, he invited the name of demagogue, infidel, and free-lover. He did not have to wait long for rancor. He believed, from his own experience, that man is the creature of circumstance, that if you exchanged the environment of thirty little Hottentots and thirty little aristocratic English children, the aristocrats would become Hottentots, for all practical purposes, and the Hottentots, little conservatives. From this he deduced the principle of abandoning rewards and punishment.[1]

  The acute Protestant, alert for his own dignity and the safety of the state, saw that this theory was doubly dangerous. It not only did away with the principle of the just wage (the reward of labor), but with the divine principle of moral responsibility, which holds that the wages of sin is death. Add to this the Spiritualism which became associated with Owen’s name, and his belief in an earthly (hence non-Messianic) millennium, and you had a compost of all heresy, all licentiousness, all the excesses of the French Revolution, all the anti-Christian theories of the Illuminati—in short, Satan’s Kingdom on earth. In 1826, the Philadelphia Gazette published some topical verses on the “Permanent Community.” The Devil has

  “heard that a number of people were going

  To live on the Wabash with great Mr. Owen”

  (the rhymes are not all as bad as that) and decides that, in the Owenite phraseology “circumstances require” him to be there:

  “Since Adam first fell by my powerful hand,

  I have wandered for victims through every known land,

  But in all my migrations ne’er hit on a plan

  That would give me the rule so completely o’er man.

  “I have set sects to fighting and shedding of blood,

  I have whispered to bigots they’re all doing good,

  Inquisitions I’ve founded, made kings my lies swallow,

  But this plan of free living beats all my plans hollow.

  “I am satisfied now this will make the coast clear,

  For men to all preaching will turn a deaf ear:

  Since its plain that religion is changed to opinions

  I must hasten back home to enlarge my dominions.

  “The devil then mounted again on the ice,

  And dashed through the waves and got home in a trice,

  And told his fell imps whom he kept at the pole

  Circumstances required they should widen the hole!”

  The press of the time published sarcastic reports of the progress of New Harmony. Vicious satires in German and English, in prose and verse, appeared everywhere. Although Owen was a lover of children—he was as much responsible as any single man for the first laws controlling child labor and was an actual pioneer in education—he was accused of drilling them by the methods of the hollow square, of taking tots from their mothers’ breasts and giving them to girls of twelve and fifteen to educate, of omitting discipline from education, and of treating human beings like
machines.[2] He was unhappy in his phrases. “Circumstances” was turned into “mechanism” and, when Owen was asked how he would account for evil, he invented the notion of the “counteracting principle” which, as indicated in a contemporary satire, had a suggestion of prenatal influence:

  “The first born of this new and perfect race in perspective, was a little boy, who, from the moment of his birth, was allowed to hear nothing but the repetition of the great precept, not to harm his play-fellows, but to do all in his power to make them happy. At three years old he was launched into the playground and made his début by biting the finger of one of the matrons who presided over our sports, and who attempted forcibly to keep him from indulging the instinct of the Man-Machine for dabbling in mud-puddle. Our master cast about for the ‘counteracting principle’ that had produced this enormity, that he might give it a sound drubbing, and to his great satisfaction discovered it in a habit which the mother a long time indulged, of biting her nails. This practice was strictly forbidden; but, as one of the fundamental principles of my master was, that no punishments were necessary to keep the Man-Machine in order any more than the steam engine, nobody minded the prohibition, and the women bit their nails, as usual, when vexed or perplexed.”

  The same pretended history of New Harmony comments on the principle of equality:

  “Some of the married women had prettier children than others—and this was a source of inequality. Some were without any children at all, and sorely envied their more happy next door neighbors, whose pretty little curly-pated machines were playing themselves into perfectibility on the lawn before their doors. On the other hand, some of the men had better, younger or prettier wives than others who not being specially instructed in such matters, did frequently break the tenth commandment. My master was, in truth, for a long while, the victim of ‘counteracting circumstances,’ he at one time as I have heard, had serious thoughts of cutting off all the women’s noses, to bring them to a level, and so organizing his men and women machines by the mere force of education, so that they should conform to the law of nature which ordains that every bird shall lay only so many eggs within a certain period. He had no doubt of bringing this about if he could only begin above, and dodge his old enemies, the ’counteracting circumstances.’”