The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  † In 1818, there were many protests against deforestation and waste of timber. † Pittsburgh was known as the Birmingham of America and also as its dirtiest city; and Lancaster was the largest inland town. † Government lands remaining after auction were sold at two dollars an acre.

  V. The New Eden—.

  AFTER each of the great revivals in America, there came a period of social experiment in founding communist colonies. John Humphrey Noyes, himself a convert during a revival and later the founder of the most successful of American communities, noted the alternation of the two movements, but he was too intelligent to claim that the communities were brought into being by the revivals. He noted a coincidence and further remarked that, while the revivals were native products, the social experiments were made under foreign influence. Others were not so cautious. The revivalists of the first half of the century insisted that the American Revolution could not have occurred without the preparatory work of the Great Revival. According to them the moral and religious tone of the country had to be aroused to a high pitch before the sublime idea of democracy could be understood and the sacrifices of war undertaken. To make this point, they had to minimize the significance of men like Paine and Jefferson. They were on much surer ground when they bracketed the camp-meetings of the first decade of the century with the colonies founded under the inspiration of Robert Owen. Had they wished to prove a general argument, they would have been entirely justified in linking the revivals of the 1830’s, as conducted by Charles Grandison Finney, with such diverse social movements as Mormonism, Noyes’ Oneida Community, the Phalansteries founded under the inspiration of Fourier, the rage of the Millerites expecting the last trump in the 1840’s, and a variety of other movements with which this book is in part concerned.

  The first of the great American communities, however, the New Eden founded by George Rapp, was entirely beyond the range of the revival system. It illustrates only Noyes’ other contention, that communistic experiments in America are imported.

  The followers of Rapp came out of Germany and, after they were settled first at Harmony, Indiana, and later at Economy, Pennsylvania, discouraged the admission of non-Germans to their society. In many ways the print of Teutonic origin is marked in the features of the Rappite colony. In other ways, however, the experiment of Rapp is typical of one group of native American experiments, and its long-continued success had a deep influence on other colonists. It was a theocracy like Mormonism and the Zion City of Dowie. It was millenarial, expecting the quick coming of Christ, like dozens of other communities. It was, like the Shaker colonies, based on the principle of rejecting sexual intercourse. Its economics were a peculiar blend of communism—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”—and absolute despotic control. Over the background, the foreground, the middle-ground, lies the shadow of a single man, as at Oneida, or Hopedale, Fruitlands, or Zion. And, as in some of these (and in many other communities) this man held his position by direct order of God, and had received God’s promise. All in all, the Rappite colony runs true to the American form. It excels its rivals in a peculiarly American way: it made a great deal of money.

  In 1814, George Rapp, a Swabian of considerable advancement, rejoicing in communication with the Almighty and expecting the present return of Christ to Jerusalem, led a band of several hundred men and women, not to the Syrian shore, but to the deep backwoods of America. Like Jonathan Edwards (whom he otherwise does not resemble), he seems to have believed that America was the place to prepare for the second coming. Rapp and some companions went ahead to look over the ground. Presently they discovered an almost ideal situation in the southwestern part of Indiana: a tract of thirty thousand acres of virgin land along the Wabash and the Ohio. The soil promised fertility, and the good Germans were not discouraged by the lack of water power, for they soon bought a steam engine—the first to be used for milling in that part of the country. Later, they made themselves flatboats and projected a steamer to navigate the Wabash when it was at high water.

  Here they founded a town, called Harmony, which became the first long home of the Rappites. They set immediately to planting and to building. Rapp and his adopted son Frederick, both men of taste, and both believers in simplicity, saw to it that the buildings were neat and not expressed in fancy. Father Rapp held the economic theory of the protectionist: that the prosperity of the settlement would depend on the degree to which it supplied its own wants. The docile men and women, dressed in buckskin and dark woolen adaptations of their Swabian peasant dress, went to work at an amazing variety of occupations. Within a few years after the foundation, Johann Lenz took a cargo by flatboat down the river to New Orleans and sold for $1,369, kegs of lard and butter, barrels of whiskey, flour, and pork, and various produce, oxen, and hogs. In the same year, Frederick Rapp was offering for sale other products: blue or black broadcloth (first quality at $7 a yard, fourth at $2: the intervening grades may have been used by the communists themselves); fur hats, flannels, and woolen stockings ($12-$18 a dozen). The society in the meantime was providing its members with all the necessities of life, and not neglecting its refinements. They had barely arrived in Indiana when the younger Rapp, who was a stone-cutter and architect, ordered a copy of Klopstock’s epic, The Messiah, and two paintings, Christ Healing the Sick, and Peter Preaching at Pentecost. A few years later, two men sent to collect money due in Germany returned with slips of some excellent grapes, a pocket telescope, a camera obscura, and some astronomical charts. From the first year the group subscribed to some ten newspapers and, at the end of a decade, the general store had about two dozen books in its stock, including Webster’s Grammar, Plutarch’s Lives, Memoirs of Napoleon, The Vicar of Wakefield, Son of a Genius, and various practical works on mathematics and navigation.

  Everybody worked at Harmony, spinning or weaving, brewing or planting; making shoes, laying bricks, dyeing; making soap, leather, watches, cider, or wine; painting homes; making barrels, boxes, pottery, or silk. Managers were appointed for the separate industries. Money which came in from the outside world was turned over to Father Rapp, who gave no account of it, and never indicated what he intended to do with it. He and the overseers and headmen lived a little more comfortably than the others, using a better grade of flour, and having wine, beer, and “groceries”[1] of which the others had none, or little. Yet each house was well built, had a vegetable and flower garden, and was supplied, from various depots, with milk, meat, and other necessities. The tailor would come running down the road if he saw a rip in a Sunday coat. The shoemaker took pride in having every man, woman, and child well-shod. Travelers would stop at the inn and find it excellent. After noonday dinner they would go out and look over the field of wheat, two miles square, in which a hundred and fifty men and women were all reaping at once, all advancing regularly under the western sun and not one with the sense of any property in the harvest. Precisely at sunset the laborers came in from the fields and workshops. One night each week they answered the meeting-house bell, filing in gravely, men at one end and women at the other, to listen to a lecture from Father Rapp. On Sundays, they spent nearly all day in religious observances, with music. Music, in fact, was the great diversion. When Bernhard, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, visited the Rappites at Economy, the factory girls asked him to come after work was done to hear them sing “in a naturally symphonious manner” sacred songs from old Württemberg hymnals, and some “of a gay character.” The observant Duke also noted that the factory was warmed in winter by means of pipes connected with the steam engine and that “vessels containing fresh sweet-scented flowers” stood on each machine.

  The settlement at Harmony was the primitive stage of the Rappite colonization. There is a naïve quality in the spectacle of a dog turning the bellows-wheel at a forge where nails were made. There is charm in the Labyrinth which represented the difficulty of arriving at Harmony (symbolized by a little temple in the center of the maze, “rough in exterior, to show that at distance it had
few attractions but smooth and beautiful within”). There were Botanic Gardens and a collection of plants “carefully arranged agreeably to the Linnæn System” and, at gatherings, there was the music of three violins, a double bass, a clarinet, a flute, and two French horns. If the industrious Rappite tossed uneasily in his simple bed, he could hear at the four dead hours of night the watch crying out, “Again a day is past and a step made nearer to our end; our time runs away and the joys of Heaven are our reward.” At three in the morning the first part changed to, “Again a night is past and the morning is come.” But the reminder of our mortal plight and of our immortal hopes remained the same. It was idyllic, and should have ended plaintively and promptly, like all idylls.

  What carried the colony through to practical success was the iron hand of Father Rapp, and his followers’ deep belief in his doctrine. In church he taught them, and out of it directed every move they made. A traveler might ask the landlord at the tavern why marriage was forbidden and what became of all the monies collected. The only reply would be, “We never answer these questions.” Even renegades from the order remained obstinately silent. The money continued to flow in: a single settlement near by paid $60,000 to the Rappites in the course of a few years, and cargoes to New Orleans went at regular intervals. The surrounding country, once grateful for the exceptional variety and quality of supplies afforded at the Harmony store, soon began to fret because there was no mutuality in dealing: Harmony sold everything, and bought nothing. (It imported raw material as needed, but everything the neighboring communities could make was better made in Harmony.) Instead of keeping money in circulation, the ageing Rapp was hoarding it or, it was suspected, sending it for some obscure purpose back to Germany. The only ones who refused to be curious were the Rappites themselves. Rapp may have threatened eternal damnation to seceders (it is very unlikely, as the Society later made handsome arrangements with any member who desired to go), but his great argument was the contrast between the amenity of life led in Harmony and the cold struggle for existence in the surrounding country. In 1822, Rapp began a systematic devolution of authority, appointing his foster son to most of the chief positions, and so gradually accustoming his people to hereditary leadership—an idea peculiarly inappropriate in a society opposed to the propagation of children and eagerly awaiting Christ’s return. Two English visitors passed through Harmony at this time, one of whom found the Rappites “a set of well-fed, well-clothed, hardworking vassals. They are very grave and serious . . . they enjoy only a sort of melancholy contentment.” The absence of children depressed him as it did most other visitors. The other Englishman came into business relations with the Rappites and his opinion was therefore based on close experience. He was Robert Owen, the ultimate owner of Harmony, and he wrote: “I have not yet met with more kind-hearted, temperate, and industrious citizens, nor found men more sincere, upright, and honest in all their dealings, than the Harmonists.”

  It would appear, however, from other sources that Owen was not deluded into buying Harmony without some knowledge of why the Rappites wanted to leave. There were a number of reasons, but the “imputation of malaria” was the gravest, and it is on record that the sufferers from this fever shook it off when the colony was transplanted to the higher ground at Economy. The Rappites were so anxious to sell that they offered an Englishman, Richard Flower, five thousand dollars as commission to make the sale. He returned to England, and found Robert Owen, flushed with the success of New Lanark, willing to buy the Harmony lands and buildings, with some of the effects, for $150,000. At five dollars an acre for improved land the Rappites were not being avaricious.

  Ninety mechanics and farmers went in advance of the other colonists to their new home, a high bluff on the right bank of the Ohio, seventeen miles below Pittsburgh which was already famous for its industry and smoke. These men cleared the ground, laid out streets, put up a cabin a day, and prepared for the coming, in May, 1825, of the Rappites’ own-built steamer, carrying the community and its goods.[2]

  Considered as an economic experiment, the rest of the story of the Rappites is less interesting. The town flourished and the directors invested in manufactures outside their own domain. They inspired the foundation of Beaver Falls. They manufactured the first silk in the United States and imported 500 coolies, whom they treated very well, to work in their cutlery mills, the largest in America. Twice the society faced dissolution—the second time owing to the absence of all account-keeping, the first because of a religious adventure. Stern measures in each case were successful. As finance does not illuminate the inner nature of the society it is only necessary to note that, in the end, when there were only three survivors, a Pittsburgh syndicate bought the town, with all it contained, and all the Rappites’ property in the charming Sewickley Valley, and left two old women and one man possessors of several million dollars.

  This was the natural end of Economy, which dwindled in population from 522 members in 1827, to 385 in 1844 (we have the division by sexes in that year, 170 men and 215 women) and to four on the 12th of May, 1903, when John S. Duss, trustee, resigned and withdrew from the Society. He was one of the married members—i.e., one who joined after marriage, and his wife, who succeeded him as trustee, was one of the last survivors. As the children of the original married members grew up, they were allowed a choice of career: to stay in the Society as full members, or as hired laborers (being in either case obliged to conform to all of the regulations of the Society including the unchanging ban on sexual intercourse); or to go outside, in which case a small sum of money was provided for them. Most of them left and, after a time, the Society ceased to encourage recruits, who might be spurred not by a love of celibacy, but by visions of the millions which Rapp and his successors had amassed. It is said that, as they grew old, the Rappites retained a serene complacency and an alertness of mind which made conversation with them a pleasure.

  The celibacy of the Rappites is their obvious point of supreme interest. I should say at once that I have made no special effort to uncover irregularities in the record. I have found it none the less surprising that of the dozens of investigators of Economy, many of them entirely dispassionate, and of the many hostile critics, not one has suggested that the Rappites were not as they claimed, i.e., opposed inexorably to the practice of intercourse between the sexes; nor is there any suggestion, anywhere, of sexual inversion. The specialist in sexual psychopathology can make surmises, but the material for proof is utterly lacking. Married people were accepted into the Society, but they also foreswore cohabitation, and accepted the religious basis imposed by Father Rapp.

  In a variety of ways the doctrine of non-intercourse reappears in other groups, some of which are noted presently, and is hinted at by leaders of religious divisions as far down as Mary Baker Eddy. Like many other cults, Rappism intended a restoration of man to the supposed ambi-sexuality of Adam—an event mystically linked with the second tenet of the Rappite, the general cult-faith in the immediacy of the Second Coming.[3]

  Of the two accounts of Creation, Father Rapp accepted in all literalness the one which says that God made man in his own image: “in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” From this he judged that Adam, at the moment of Creation was, like God, endowed with the essential qualities of both sexes, and that Adam could have procreated, in that state, had he so desired. Adam’s discontent persuaded God to remove from his body the female part or principle, and to give it to him as a companion. This—and not the eating of the fruit—constituted the Fall. Hence God’s displeasure with man, and hence the promise that, when the world is regenerated, man will recapture his divine attribute of containing both sexes in one body. This consummation will occur, of course, at the return of Christ who, being divinely born, is a dual being, and who will instantly accept into his company those who have lived in his image—i.e., denying the separation of the sexes—while all others will have to undergo a probationary, lustral period.

  For their special
explanation of the origin of celibacy the Rappites drew to an extent on the mysticism of Jacob Boehme in which, also, the perfection of Adam before the Fall is centered in his duality of sex. What Rapp saw practically was that the sexual impulse was the mastering cause of human ambition, rivalry, and confusion. So long as these existed, the Kingdom of Christ was delayed. Being convinced that the delay could not be long, he desired men to live in the Adamic state, in preparation for the Return. It had a logic of its own, this doctrine and, in practical affairs, it worked to perfection. Rapp felt that celibates gave themselves more completely to a common cause than those whose sexual lives were woven into the lives of others. He may have counted on the dullness, the placidity, which an ordained celibacy often brings. He had the example of centuries of monastic life to go by and, indeed, his city was only a modern monastery, with a nunnery within its precincts. It remained for a purely American experiment to work from Rapp’s basis to precisely opposite ends. In the Oneida Community not only marriage, but love concentrated in one person, was recognized as fatal to the free gift to the Community of all the individual had. But, instead of banishing love, Noyes liberated it and canalized it “for the greatest good of the greatest number.” Oneida would have interested Byron at least as much as the Rappites; and would not have puzzled him so much. In Don Juan, Byron wrote: