Noyes and his followers went, at the invitation of Jonathan Burt, a land owner, to Oneida, in Madison County, New York, where they were to attain a great success and to practice freely the system of industry and the methods of sexual relations which Noyes was developing. In the first ten years of his leadership, Noyes was primarily a prophet of a new religion, the doctrines of which we have seen in their least attractive phases. While the colony broke ground, starved in horticultural simplicity, and was saved from disaster by a steel trap, the doctrines grew to maturity. For a moment we can leave Noyes and his band clearing swamps, farming a little, building log cabins, using an attic for a sleeping apartment, living on an enforced diet of bread, milk, potatoes, and beans, because they had nothing else and Noyes’ principle was “pay as you go,” so that only occasionally could they buy a pound of sugar at the grocery. In a barn without pulpit or chairs, they held their Sunday gatherings, and here Noyes began his extraordinary home talks in which the full glory of Perfectionism was unfolded.
That glory breaks upon us in diminished splendor. What is hard to understand is not the doctrine itself, but the fact that anyone could believe it. Yet it did not spring sourceless into existence. The eighteenth century had given birth to at least two ideas which are its ancestors: the idea that man is naturally good and that society is the source of crime, and the idea of infinite progress to perfection. Both of these ideas were abominated by Calvinists who believed man naturally depraved and perfection attainable only in Christ. But Noyes combined the hostile articles of faith and made Christ the solvent of man’s present evil and the source of his immediate good. It was the immediacy of Perfectionism which offended. In the hereafter we could be saints, all or a few of us, in accordance with various modifications of Calvinism; but Noyes said that in this life, in the pursuit of our daily functions, man is perfect if he only chooses the way to perfection. And being perfect he is superior to the restraints placed by imperfect men upon their imperfect brethren. The new covenant of pure Perfectionism “gives liberty from external law.” The system likewise “disclaims all obligation to obeying the moral law” for “believers by fellowship with Christ in His resurrection, are released from the beggarly elements and carnal ordinances of that worldly sanctuary which they have left,” and any impulse of a true Perfectionist—since Christ is really its author—is legitimate and praiseworthy. There were Perfectionists who went beyond Noyes and he was at pains to mark the differences between himself and them. It is properly of the more radical Perfectionists that contemporaries were thinking when they said, with Asa Mahan, himself a mild Finneyite Oberlin Perfectionist:
“1. Perfectionism in its fundamental principles, is the abrogation of all law. . . . (2) In abrogating law, as a rule of duty, Perfectionism abrogates all obligation of every kind. (3) Perfectionism is a ‘rest’ which suspends all efforts and prayer, even for the salvation of the world. (4) Perfectionism substitutes the direct teaching of the Spirit, falsely so called, in the place of the ‘word.’ (5) Perfectionism surrenders up the soul to blind impulse assuming that every existing desire or impulse is caused by the direct agency of the Spirit and therefore to be justified. (6) Perfectionism abrogates the Sabbath and all the ordinances of the Gospel, and, in its legitimate tendencies, even marriage itself. (7) Perfectionism by abrogating all law, abrogates all standards of conduct and accordingly demoralizes man. (8) Perfectionism, in short, in its essential elements, is the perfection of licentiousness.” Or, with Henry Cowles, Perfectionism “supposes the Christian to receive Christ within him, in such a way, that henceforth Christ only acts within him; and whatever himself seems to do, Christ really does. Some even suppose their own individual being to be absorbed or merged into Christ, so that themselves, as distinct persons, have ceased to exist, and all that was themselves is not Christ. . . . It either avowedly or virtually annihilates personal agency and responsibility. . . . As a consequence, mental impressions supposed to be from the Spirit of God, are deemed perfect truth and law, paramount even to the Bible itself. . . . These principles lead more or less extensively, as the case may be, to the rejection of all Gospel ordinances, the disuse of prayer, and to all manner of licentiousness.”
Noyes himself shows no timidity in the early expression of his doctrine. By communing with Christ and “apprehending . . . his victory over sin and death . . . and the spiritual reconciliation of God with man . . . believers are brought into fellowship with Christ’s death and resurrection, and made partakers of His divine nature and His victory over the evil one.” And “faith identifies the soul with Christ, so that by His death and resurrection the believer dies and rises again, not literally, nor yet figuratively, but spiritually; and thus, so far as sin is concerned, is placed beyond the grave, in heavenly places with Christ.” We are actually living, according to Noyes, in the Resurrection state, and are as free from law as we are from sin. William Lloyd Garrison wrote him a letter expressing identical views: “There is nothing more offensive to the religionists of the day than practical holiness; and the doctrine that total abstinence from sin in this life is not only commanded but necessarily obtainable they hate with a perfect hatred, and stigmatize entire freedom from sin as a delusion of the devil! Nevertheless, ‘He that is born of God cannot commit sin,’ ‘He that committeth sin is of the devil.’ . . . ‘There is therefore now no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit. For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made us free from the law of sin and death.’”
Noyes was not slow to see that out of his doctrine there might rise fundamental difficulties with the statutes. He did not want one of his Perfectionists to be haled into court for nonpayment of debt or murder and defend himself by saying, “My religion tells me I can do whatever I please, that I cannot sin, and that I am not subject to your law.”[3] At the same time, he saw that Perfectionism, carried to any extreme, would ruin Oneida, for some sort of authority had to exist in industrial relations. Under this pressure his Perfectionism was remolded and refined. Unity, organization, and self-improvement were exalted against the individualism, chaos, and licentiousness of all other brands of Perfectionism and Noyes drew up a table showing his position between the strict legalist and the type of Perfectionist opposed to all restraints. One makes law the paramount factor, the other freedom from law; Noyes makes “God’s leadership exercised through Christ by love without law” supreme. He carries the contrast through. The legal type has action with insufficient faith. The antinomian has faith with insufficient action. The true Perfectionist (Noyes) has “faith which accepts God’s leadership and brings forth corresponding action.” So the Perfectionist alone cultivates the intellect as a guide to faith and action, whereas the others either disparage it or use it without purpose. The one finally results in impotence; the other, in irresponsibility. Only Perfectionism leads to salvation from sin. Noyes’ table is an extremely neat argument in which not a single point in the first two columns would be admitted by anyone except a Noyesian. The significant thing is that Noyes did succeed in founding a community on the basis of Perfectionism, that he imposed a strict and, in some respects, inhuman discipline and that, to the very end, he escaped the hand of the law. We may say that his theory was all too obviously created to fit his special facts. It will appear more likely that the theory was developed in order to regulate events, to be prepared for “facts” in human nature. In any event, it worked amazingly.
On all these theories, Noyes founded a community considerably less sanctimonious, much better managed, and far less dreary, than most of the others of the century. The second period of his life of leadership was concerned with the workings of his practice in the “ascending fellowship” or “complex marriage.” It was only in the third that industry became a dominating motive. But it was external hostility to his sexual theory which eventually made him depart from his industrial community. It was only after industry was well under way that he placed the keystone of eugenics in the arch
of his marriage theories. For that reason we can reverse his chronology and look at Oneida as an industrial community before examining its extraordinary basis of sexual intercourse.
The early struggles of Oneida are like those of every other colony. For a long time the communists did all their own work and attempted to live on the proceeds of their farms and fruitlands. On the title page of their first publication appeared a banner reading “Horticulture the Leading Means of Subsistence.” The chief mechanical aid they had was a sawmill.[4]
Excellent jams and preserves left the colony with a growing financial burden from which they might never have escaped without the invention, by Sewall Newhouse, of a steel animal trap instantly recognized as superior to the German traps which had previously held the American market. Noyes was too intelligent to pour the baby out with the bath. He was opposed to the wage system and to private property, but he was not opposed to the advantages of industry which wages and property could create. The sacredness of the land, on which so many other communities broke, left him indifferent. He recognized America as an industrial country and knew that Oneida, in order to survive, must be an industrial community.
Newhouse had improved the Soligen and Elberfeld traps by making one lighter in weight, simpler in form, and more certain and deadly in its spring. Within a few months, the German traps were unsalable in the state of New York and, within a few seasons, the Oneida trap had captured the entire market. In one year the profit on these traps alone amounted to $80,000 and, even after scores of imitators had cut into the industry, it remained a highly profitable one. When a visitor suggested that traps for killing animals were a strange source of daily bread in a terrestrial kingdom of heaven, a communist replied gravely that the earth is lying under a curse of which vermin are a consequence and that the Oneidists do well to destroy them and thus help to perfect the earth. Steel chains were presently manufactured for use with the traps. When the community was seven years old, an extensive canning industry was started. Some ten years later, they began the manufacture of sewing and embroidery silks. They made traveling bags, and invented labor-saving machinery, and built their own machines for the silk factory, afterwards producing silk-making machinery for sale. Eventually, the community added hardware and the famous community silver. When the time came to transform the community into a stock-company, an issue of $600,000 was made. By the year 1900, without any serious deviation from the methods of the founders, the corporation had doubled the capital stock, with factories in many cities and annual sales, at that time, of two million dollars, most of the enterprise remaining under the direction of men who had been born in the community.
This exceptional achievement was accomplished almost without friction and without the shadow of regimentation. The communists of Oneida had an almost fanatical horror of forms. They would move from place to place and, when a second community was founded at Wallingford, Connecticut, the two populations were within reason interchangeable. They would deliberately avoid scheduled functions, change the number of meals from three to eight a day and back to three, and vary the hours at which they ate. Every communist worked at several trades. In particular, the disagreeable tasks of the community were never performed by the same person for longer than two months.
The organization of the business was entirely democratic. The heads of the industrial departments gathered every Sunday morning to discuss business and these sessions were open to any member of the community. On Sunday evening, the minutes of the morning session were read and criticized by the entire group. Before the great annual meeting, which determined plans of campaign for the year, all the members were asked to make suggestions. It was the ideal of Oneida to attempt nothing without the general consent of all the members, and those having preferences in work were indulged to the greatest possible extent. The hours of labor were not long and, when the community was matured, a large number of outsiders were hired to do whatever was pure drudgery. There was no bell ordering the communists to work, but a large board with pegs indicated the whereabouts of each person, and the community never had any difficulty with idlers. The men dressed in ordinary clothes; but the women, who worked with the men and frequently superintended whole factories, wore a dress “consisting of a bodice, loose trousers and a short skirt falling to just above the knees.” Although they bobbed their hair, and the younger women usually gave it a curl, Charles Nordhoff, who visited them in the 1870’s, found the dress of the women “totally and fatally lacking in grace and beauty.” But Hepworth Dixon, the English observer, whose reports caused Noyes so much pain, found that in the Oneida dress “a plain woman escapes much notice, and a pretty girl looks bewitching.” He says that this is not part of Noyes’ plan, “but for my own poor self, being only a Gentile and a sinner, I could not help seeing that many of his young disciples have been gifted with rare beauty, and that two of the singing girls, Alice Ackley and Harriet Worden, have a grace and suppleness of form, as well as loveliness of face and hand, to warm a painter’s heart.” He adds, however, that the total sum set aside for each woman’s dress for a year was $33 and that this included shoes and hats.
Whenever a man needed a suit of clothes he went to the tailor, who made it for him, and there was a functionary known as “incidentals” who met unforeseen expenses for the colonists and supplied the younger women with breastpins, their only ornament. A committee for watches—there were twenty-one committees in all—was appealed to when anyone needed a time-piece. The community ate in one large hall, the table consisting of a stationary rim and a revolving center, the rim for one’s own plate and the center for the food. The meal was not served in courses but in the “old-fashioned domestic style,” the principal dishes, sauces, bread, and butter, and condiments all being put on when the meal started, and the dining plates and knives and forks only changed when shortcake appeared. The excellence of the Oneida meals was famous and perhaps accounted in part for the six thousand visitors, who outnumbered the communists three to one during an average summer. The upbringing of the children was extremely careful. They were well fed, properly dressed and almost continually in the open air until an hour or two after dinner, when “they come in and sit down for half an hour and have a little meeting in which they listen to Bible stories, repeat their little verses and confess Christ all around,” after which, with a bath twice a week, they were put to bed. The children were in their mothers’ care only until they were weaned. They then went into the nursery. It was a particular point of pride with Noyes that the children were especially healthy and intelligent and that parents loved the children of others as much as their own.
Although he concentrated on a theory of sexual relation, Noyes also cared deeply about the social relations of his people. His communism, it must be remembered, was Bible communism. It was equally opposed to the infidel communism of Owen and the transcendental communism of Brook Farm. “I tell you,” Noyes is reported as saying, “they have all failed . . . because they were not founded on Bible truth. Religion is at the root of life; and a safe social theory must always express a religious truth. Now there are four stages in the true organization of a family: (1) Reconciliation with God; (2) Salvation from sin; (3) Brotherhood of man and woman; (4) Community of labor and of its fruits. Owen, Ripley, Fourier, Cabet, began at the third and fourth stages; they left God out of their tale, and they came to nothing.” Oneida was actually a part of the restoration of primitive Christianity. What was more, if Perfectionists could not love one another, the whole system was challenged; and, in the back of his mind, Noyes probably also knew that harmony between the communists was the only certain basis of financial success. He had therefore to prevent jealousies, rivalries, gossiping, and intrigue. He was not fool enough to think that calling men Perfectionists would instantly erase these stains on human character. In sexual relations an iron theory of “ascending fellowship” governed. For all other relations he instituted the extraordinary system of mutual criticism. At frequent meetings the members of the community woul
d criticize one another in public, a certain number of them appearing before the rest for criticism each time. These criticisms were afterwards printed and a few samples show how direct they were:
The Stammering Century Page 23
