While hostility mounted outside, disagreements plagued the New Harmonites internally. Owen, says one of the members, “advised that they should appoint a committee from amongst themselves, every week to inspect the houses in the village and to insert in a book to be given for that purpose, a faithful report of the state of each house as they might happen to find it. They almost unanimously resolved to meet the visitors with closed doors. They bestowed upon them the appellation of ‘Bug Hunters,’ and Mr. Owen escaped not without his share of the general odium.” The Duke of Saxe-Weimar, moving on from the new home of the Rappites to their old one, found that their successors were not so universally happy in democracy. The incident he notes is utterly trivial; it must have occurred a thousand times in democratic communities; but one can still feel the unimportant, but symptomatic heartbreak it records:
“In the evening I . . . saw the philosophy and the love of equality put to a severe test. She is named Virginia and while she was playing and singing very well on the piano she was told that the milking of the cows was her duty. Almost in tears she betook herself to this servile employment, execrating the Social System and its so much prized equality. After the cows were milked, in doing which, the young girl was trod on by one and mired by another, I joined an aquatic party with the young ladies and some young philosophers in a very good boat upon the Wabash. The beautiful Miss Virginia forgot her stable duties and regaled us in a sweet voice.”
Owen meanwhile gave his usual lectures and it was unanimously voted that the entire population should meet three times a week for the purpose of being educated together. Five days later, we learn that the sixth successive constitution was adopted. This most important event is chronicled in a diary as follows:
“Aug. 25. The people held a meeting at which they abolished all officers then existing, and appointed three men as dictators.”
Owen departed for a time. There were many other things for him to do. There was Hands’ Machine for preventing shipwrecks which the inventor wanted Owen to back. A shoemaker, who had been giving lectures in astronomy in pot-houses, would be pleased if Mr. Owen would buy him a van, so that he might extend the radius of his activities. A friend would like a peerage: could Owen help? Frances MacCrone has invented the art of flying “and wants £100 for two months” which does not seem excessive. J. Westbrook has invented a secret voting machine. Not to mention the Universal Devastator, of Sweetlove and Cowen, which was so terrifying that the mere threat of its use would bring all nations to universal peace. All the cranks of the world were crowding around Owen and it is remarkable that he kept his head as long as he did. Eventually, he was to issue Weekly Letters to the Human Race, to embrace Spiritualism à l’outrance, and to succumb to the temptation to speak a little wildly. On the first of May, 1855, he called a meeting “to prepare the public for the introduction of the knowledge of the Millennial State of human existence and to explain how the people of the world might immediately commence it in peace and with universal good-will,” and set the date—the 14th of May of the same year—as the inauguration of the Millennium.
In the midst of all these activities, Owen had returned to America, had met the fantastic Santa Anna in Mexico (who offered him a county or so for a colony under certain conditions), and had faced the disagreeable fact that New Harmony was not a going concern. In its first three years there had been no less than ten secessions. One of these resulted in the foundation of Macluria, named after its founder, presumably the scientific amateur who visited Pestalozzi at Yverdon in 1805 and is credited by Beard with a profound influence in humanizing and making truly democratic the American system of education. MacClure was one of the first Americans whom Mrs. Trollope met. Her reactionary bias and her sarcasm were however ready. Her suggestion of the “intimate acquaintance” and the “nephew-son” are in her best manner:
“In the shop of Miss C—I was introduced to Mr. M’Clure, a venerable personage of gentlemanlike appearance, who in the course of five minutes propounded as many axioms, as ‘Ignorance is the only devil’; ‘Man makes his own existence’; and the like. He was of the New Harmony school, or rather the New Harmony school was of him. He was a man of good fortune (a Scotchman, I believe), who after living a tolerably gay life, had ‘conceived high thoughts, such as Lycurgus loved, who bade flog the little Spartans,’ and determined to benefit the species, and immortalize himself, by founding a philosophical school at New Harmony. There was something in the hollow square legislations of Mr. Owen, that struck him as admirable, and he seems, as far as I can understand, to have intended aiding his views, by a sort of incipient hollow square drilling; teaching the young ideas of all he could catch, to shoot into parallelogramic form and order. This venerable philosopher, like all of his school that I ever heard of, loved better to originate lofty imaginings of faultless systems, than to watch their application to practice. With much liberality he purchased and conveyed to the wilderness a very noble collection of books and scientific instruments; but not finding among men one whose views were liberal and enlarged as his own, he selected a woman to put into action the machine he had organized. As his acquaintance with this lady had been of long standing, and, as it was said, very intimate, he felt sure that no violation of his rules, would have place under her sway; they would act together as one being: he was to perform the functions of the soul, and will every thing; she those of the body, and perform every thing.
“The principal feature of the scheme was, that (the first liberal outfit of the institution having been furnished by Mr. M’Clure), the expense of keeping it up should be defrayed by the profits arising from the labors of the pupils, male and female, which was to be performed at stated intervals of each day, in regular rotation with learned study and scientific research. But unfortunately the soul of the system found the climate of Indiana uncongenial to its peculiar formation, and, therefore, took its flight to Mexico, leaving the body to perform the operations of both. . . . When last I heard of this philosophical establishment, she, and a nephew-son were said to be reaping a golden harvest, as many of the lads had been sent from a distance by indigent parents, for gratuitous education, and possessed no means of leaving it.”
Macluria lasted two years. Another secession rejoiced in the name of Feiba Peveli which “calls for explanation.” According to the New Harmony Gazette, “Stedman Whitwell, its godfather and presumable founder, invented a system of nomenclature under which the name of a place should contain an indication of its latitude and longitude; a or b representing I, e or d—2, the diphthong ei—8, and so on. Thus Feiba Peveli is 38’ 11” N., 87’ 53” W. Under this system New Harmony (38’ 11” N., 87’ 55” W.) might be called Ipba Veinul; London and Paris might be known henceforth as Lafa-Tovutu and Oput Tedou respectively. The system is recommended by its author as ‘agreeable alike to the man of common sense and to the man of taste’!”
There was also Nashoba, which was not a secession but an offshoot, founded by Fanny Wright and directed by her with the aid of Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen. Against appalling opposition, Fanny Wright bought slaves, freed them, and started for them a school and community, on approved principles. It did not work and, after a short time, she translated her freedmen to Haiti and settled them there. The Grimké sisters, who merely freed their slaves, escaped the worst persecutions which Fanny Wright incurred. By combining practical abolition with Communism and the taint of free-love, Miss Wright figured as everything hateful and corrupt, and her name became the symbol for vice and disruption.[3]
While these experiments continued, and a few others, New Harmony was rapidly breaking up. The actual end, which was a signal, for the end of all the others, is involved in financial difficulties. Owen lost much, and was presently to lose still more in England and become “an endearing old bore.” A scene near the end of New Harmony’s life is sad enough for an epitaph:
“A traveler who saw the village at this time describes it as a scene of idleness and revelry. There were, he declares, a thousand persons
of every age, sex, and condition gathered in the town, with no visible means of support save the generosity of the visionary Mr. Owen. In the school, which was held in the old brick church of the Rappites, were three hundred and thirty children who were under no control whatever, for the plan of Education was that of Pestalozzi, in which the sole punishment for bad behaviour was a short confinement. The teachers, he was amazed to find, had thrown aside the Christian faith, and taught doctrines not unlike those held by the German Illuminati at the opening of the French Revolution. In and about the Village, no man seemed to be busy. The houses were falling into a state of dilapidation, the gardens were full of weeds, the fences were down, and the curious labyrinth constructed by Rapp had been destroyed by cattle.”
Presently it ended. Robert Dale Owen remained in America, entered Congress, fought for the rights of men and women. The colony radiated influence in spite of its failure. In spite of its failure, too, it had done an essential work in providing a tangent to the vicious circle of work and profit which then circumscribed the American mind. We think of trusts and strikes, of Russian communism and radical labor, as phenomena of our own day and cannot imagine that they had their counterparts a century ago. It seems unreasonable that there should have been labor troubles in a new country dedicated to freedom and equality, with so much land to be had for the asking, so many roads and canals and machines to be built, so many articles to be made and sold. But the troubles existed none the less. Before 1800, strikes were known. There were strikes for wages and strikes for human rights. The country was plunging headlong into the factory system which was presently to become pestilential almost beyond our power to imagine. Within a few years after Owen’s experiment, the wage and property system he attacked was to result in whole cities built to order by manufacturers, in tenements (they were already noted as a civic disgrace in the 1830’s), and in a brutalizing poverty. There were men and women who could not face the rigors of the wilderness, its prompt demands and slow returns, without assistance. There were exploiters of labor utterly conscienceless, engrossed in making profit, accepting a moral standard which approved trickery, default, dishonesty of every sort. Between these the first communities stepped, offering a hand to the one, and a warning to the other. They were obviously hopeless, these experiments. Their economic theory was almost purely one of moral ideas. The leaders were more often high-minded than highly intelligent. By principle they refused to reject applicants whom they must have recognized as fools or knaves. And the societies they built were wholly unattractive, lacking luster and heart and beauty. It is, perhaps, the special fatality of communist experiments that they consistently lose the very quality they exalt. The colonies which are meant to exalt beauty, are mean and ugly; the love colonies are peculiarly unhappy as settings for a great passion. Their failure is in that nature of things which they did not understand. But they did say, with the violent emphasis of all the reformers of that time, “there is a greater freedom than man now possesses, there is a freedom from the tyranny of money and of materialism. The system which glorifies only money is not the only system.” They failed to prove their point; but at least they announced it.
[1] Pestalozzi was doing the same thing in his schools, and the whole progress of statutory and prison reform was tending in the same direction.
[2] Owen’s ideas, wherever he got them, curiously foreshadowed experiments of our own time. He wanted children to have no books before they were ten; he preferred teaching by objects to verbal exercises, and he dramatized everything, even Grammar in which appear General Noun, Colonel Verb, and so on, down to Corporal Adverb, which isn’t, in spite of the names, exactly a barrack-square method of instruction.
[3] See pages 341, 342.
† “At Cincinnati one came upon vineyards.” † Cautionary Verses for Children were widely read; the American Bible Society was founded in 1816; and eternal damnation was preached to the Indians. † From 1801 to 1820, the American publishers had an association which was broken up by competition in pirating the novels of Walter Scott. James Fenimore Cooper had the greatest difficulty in getting an American publisher since it was cheaper to pirate than to pay royalties. † In December, 1802, the United States Navy had a 74-gun ship in the Pacific, the frigate Constitution in the Mediterranean, the corvette Cyane off the coast of Africa, and the brig Spark in the West Indies. † Broadway, in New York, was considered more attractive at night than by day. † Lawyers were as common in that city as paupers in England. “A gentleman walking on Broadway seeing a friend pass, called out to him ‘doctor’ and immediately sixteen persons turned around.” † Banks and public buildings in Philadelphia were an unsightly combination of brick and marble. † Pins cost a dollar a paper. † In New Orleans the theater, circus, and public poolrooms were open on Sunday and gambling houses and coffee houses were occupied from morning to night by gamesters, in spite of the fact that Louisiana was now a part of the United States. † It was the custom of bridegrooms to hold a levee the day after the wedding and on this occasion the bride did not appear. † In the backwoods marriage without legal or religious sanction took place with propriety and awaited the arrival of itinerant judges or preachers.
VII. Winners of Souls.
THE infidel communities inspired by Robert Owen failed; revivalists pointed to them as the work of Anti-Christ and continued to prepare for the Kingdom of the Lord. The work of preparation continued for a century. Between 1800 and 1860, it was the one great religious movement in America, overshadowing the progress of liberal theology. It entered so fully into the lives of ordinary men and women that it became almost equal in importance to the conquest of the West, the struggle over slavery, the progress of mechanics, and the other decisive movements of the time. Like them, revivalism had a share in creating the national character. It became part of the national background and left a mark on the mind and soul of America.
The ultimate object of revivalism is to hasten the coming of Christ by effecting the regeneration of mankind. The object of any single revival is to quicken the Christian soul and to convert the sinner. The crisis of a revival is in conversion and the crisis of conversion is when the anxious seeker for salvation undergoes the conviction of sin. The revivalist’s object, then, is to persuade his hearers of their sinfulness and to urge them to regeneration by accepting the intercession of Christ. To these ends various means have been used and various effects have followed them. Thus briefly we may conceive the subject.
By 1815, the revival system had successfully established itself as the working method of many Protestant churches in America. It was inspired by the theology of Edwards, the fervor of Wesley, and the wild enthusiasm of the camp-meetings—all of them singularly successful in their time. Whether the age so desperately called for refreshing as the revivalist assumed, is, after all, only an abstract question. Men rose by hundreds who were so moved by their vision of saintliness, or damnation, and so constituted psychologically in relation to their fellowmen that they had to go and exhort and threaten and pray. There remained a deal of passive infidelism, and here and there Deists were active. Graver still for the Calvinistic preachers was the progress of Universalism which challenged their first assumptions and particularly the one on which revivals were based. If we put ourselves for a moment in the position of a stern Calvinist or even of a moderate like Finney, we can see how dangerous Universalism appeared. As Calvinists, we ourselves believe that man by nature is depraved, that Christ has atoned for our sins and that, by this atonement, he has given to those of us who accept him, a chance to escape the damnation which we deserve, to partake of his substance and become changed men. At our right is the strict Calvinist who makes regeneration unbearably difficult and offers faint hope even to the regenerate since the world is divided inexorably between the elect and the non-elect. Opposite both of us stands the dangerous Universalist who believes that Christ’s atonement is all that is necessary and that by it salvation is open to all men, as an almost certain grace from heaven. As good
Presbyterians we suspect that this is much too easy a form of salvation. As good Christians we envy it only the appeal it makes to the multitude but, in that very appeal, we see its gravest dangers. For by giving men a false sense of security and a misleading hope of escape, it leads them from the true path. The Universalist thus stood in greater peril of damnation than the utterly unregenerate, greater than the atheist and the blasphemer. The others might still seek the true way, but the believer in Universalism had already rejected it and gone by another path.
The churches, moreover, were appallingly dull. Instead of “the beaten oil of the sanctuary” which the evangelist, Daniel Baker, was to offer his listeners, he himself was brought up on “dry logical sermons, with rounded periods, delivered in a cold, formal, and heartless manner” which he could never relish, “however beautified by the superficial elegances of composition.” What he and others wanted was “warm, animating, lively, evangelominous preaching, full of fire, breathing love and compassion.” What they got may be judged from Finney’s description of one of his first pastors at work: “To give some idea of his preaching, let me say that his manuscript sermons were just large enough to put into a small Bible. I sat in the gallery, and observed that he placed his manuscript in the middle of his Bible, and inserted his fingers at the places where were to be found the passages of Scripture to be quoted in the reading of his sermon. This made it necessary to hold his Bible in both hands, and rendered all gesticulation with his hands impossible. As he proceeded he would read the passages of Scripture where his fingers were inserted, and thus liberate one finger after another until the fingers of both hands were read out of their places. When his fingers were all read out, he was near the close of the sermon.”
The Stammering Century Page 13
