Behind this was the fixed idea of Noyes that love can be not only controlled, but guided to its proper object. He rejected the whole idea of spontaneous affinity in love. He was as distant as he could be from the Fourierite idea of natural pairing and parting. Young people might “fall in love with” one another, but the procedure was neither encouraged by a vast literature of love, nor was it in “sympathy” with the social system. There were no trysts, no dear secret vows. If a man desired a woman for a mate, the proposal was made in the presence of a third party, the older women of the community usually acting as the intermediaries. No proposal which was offensive had to be accepted; but it seems clear that certain proposals—of young men to young women—might have been made if the force of public opinion had not prevented. By this system, the unspiritual and inexperienced were prevented from mating, and marriages being impermanent, as a man or woman grew older the prospect of younger lovers still remained. The young enjoyed the benefit of intercourse with the more instructed and subtle. The old rejoiced in the somewhat formally offered fire of the young.
He had said that “my wife is yours, is Christ’s, and so is the bride of all saints” and, at Oneida, this bold saying was boldly lived. It is hard to say to what extent Noyes and the Community interfered with any tendency to be monogamous. The natural point of separation between lovers would be an acceptable proposal from another man. But there was no compromise in the theory, and probably very little in action. Noyes was creating a Bible Family in the patriarchal sense and would tolerate no suggestion of private attachments. “We do not believe,” he says, “in ownership of persons at all, either by spiritual claim or legal claim. We give no quarter to the ‘marriage spirit,’ or to ‘special love,’ or to any other fashion of idolatry and appropriation that takes folks out of the family circle of heaven and dedicates them to one another. How much should we gain for Social Communism by merely shifting from legal marriage to spiritual marriage? Such a change would only make matters worse, in proportion as spiritual ties are stronger than legal. Swedenborgians believe in eternal monogamy; Spiritualists believe in mating by affinity; and fanatics generally . . . adopt one form or another of . . . dualism, involving more sentimentalism and in the end worse slavery than common marriage. But the Oneida Community instead of training in any of these companies, has always fought them, and maintained that the only true foundation is that which Jesus Christ laid when he said that in the good time coming there will be no marriage at all.”
With the ascending fellowship (from young to experienced, from uncouth to spiritual) and with directed love, Noyes had become a tyrant compelling his followers to be promiscuous—so his enemies said. He was to take a further step—and to succeed. In the first eight years of their married life, Harriet Noyes had borne five children to her husband, four of them prematurely and with appalling agony. Only one of the five children lived. This experience “under God,” says Noyes, directed his studies to the subject of sexual intercourse:
“After our last disappointment I told my wife that I would never again expose her to such fruitless suffering. I made up my mind to live apart from her, rather than break this vow. This was the situation in the summer of 1844. At that time I conceived the idea that the sexual organs have a social function which is distinct from the propagative function; and that these functions may be separated practically. I experimented on this idea, and found that the self-control which it required was not difficult; also that my enjoyment was increased; also that my wife’s experience was very satisfactory, as it had never been before; also that we had escaped the horrors and the fear of involuntary propagation. This was a great deliverance. It made a happy household. I communicated my discovery to Mr. Cragin. His experience and that of his household was the same. In the course of the next two years I studied all the essential details and bearings of the discovery. In 1846, we commenced Community life. In 1848, I published the theory of Male Continence. This is the only true account of the origin of that theory.”
Whatever Noyes wrote on the subject is sober, rather severely expressed, and emphatic. But as it describes a means of preventing unwanted children from being born, I am not permitted, under the laws of the United States and under the eye of The Society for the Suppression of Vice, to quote him. What he means by saying that the sexual organs have a social function is that the early stages of coition have a spiritual quality and a richness of emotion which is dissipated by the physical excitement of the later, propagative, stages. What he proposes is to prolong this early pleasure of presence and communion, and to “refrain from furious excitement.” “If you say that this is impossible,” he cries after an almost lyrical outburst on the sweetness and nobility of the first moment of intercourse, “I answer that I know it is possible—nay, that it is easy.”
It was a system of moral restraint and self-control—it differed from every method of birth-control known at that time. It was freely published. Noyes debated its merits in print with doctors and laymen. He denied that it caused debility in men and women and his figures at Oneida proved that he was right. He himself had eight children after he was fifty-eight years old.
But he did not stop at Male Continence because it lacked relation to his whole edifice of theory. He had spoken of the act of sex with frankness and freedom—and his own words lack the unhappy air which surrounds their restatement above. He was now to speak of cohabitation in regard to breeding, and to be as audacious in eugenics as he had been in marriage. To use the briefest and most shocking terms, Noyes asserted the necessity of incest and in-breeding, if man is to produce a superior race.
For a generation, Oneida Community had held about two hundred and fifty souls; it is obvious that unless the society scattered, or attracted an overwhelming number of new adepts, in-breeding and incest, within an unusual, if not unnatural, degree of blood-relationship, must result within the next few generations. So a defensive theory was needed. Noyes lifted it out of the class of apologies by a combination of fervor and logic. Characteristically he stretched out his hands to touch patriarchal Israel with one, and modern science with the other. First he announced that “scientific generation is a business second in importance only to regeneration” (which in his terminology means accepting Christ, becoming a Perfectionist, and living in the ascending fellowship). He even goes so far as to suggest that “regeneration and all other forms of education depend for their success on right generation. By the grace of God, men and women can be taught to enjoy love that stops short of propagation” and to go in for scientific selection. (It will be noted that this proposal in eugenics gives moral purpose to Male Continence and brings it completely into the structure of Perfectionism, the religion, and Bible Communism, the practical system of life.) The vital center of sociology, he asserts, is the science which presides over reproduction, and adds (in 1873), “It is becoming clear that the foundations of scientific society are to be laid in the scientific propagation of human beings.” He had read his Darwin; from Galton he took the idea of hereditary genius; he was himself ready; and the children of his later years all came after the attempt at scientific propagation had begun. In the course of four years, twenty-four women and twenty men cohabited four times a month for the purpose of propagating “proportionately to the average family’s capacity to have children.” It is as well to anticipate a question raised by critics at the time. The answer is, “No idiotic, deaf and dumb, blind or deformed children have been born in the community,” and the ratio of nervous diseases among infants and adults was about half that of New England and New York.
Noyes begins with the usual argument from the stock-breeder. It is useless to perfect an individual if we cannot reproduce him; i.e., blood must precede training as it did in the half dozen or so famous stallions who have sired nearly all the supremely fine horses in the United States. In breeding animals we get quantity from the female, quality from the male. What prevents the application of this obvious rule to humanity?
“Though it must be concede
d that, in the present state of human passions and institutions, there are many great difficulties in the way of our going back to the natural simplicity of the Hebrew fathers or forward to the scientific simplicity of the cattle-breeders, yet it is important to know and remember that these difficulties are not physiological, but sentimental. As the old theologians used to say, our inability to obey the law of God is not natural, but moral. We are too selfish and sensual and ignorant to do for ourselves what we have done for animals, but we have surrounded ourselves with institutions corresponding to and required by our selfishness and sensuality and ignorance. But for all that we need not give up the hope of better things, at least in some far-off future. If the difficulties in our way were natural and physiological, no amount of science or grace could ever overcome them; but as they are only passional and institutional, we may set the very highest standard of thorough-breeding before us as our goal, and believe that every advance of civilization and science is carrying us toward it.”
Having brought in scientific propagation to give dignity to his sexual system, Noyes uses it as another argument against marriage:
“Undoubtedly the institution of marriage is an absolute bar to scientific propagation. It distributes the business of procreation in a manner similar to that of animals which pair in a wild state; that is, it leaves mating to be determined by a general scramble without attempt at scientific direction. Even if the phrenologists and scientific experts had full power to rearrange the pairs from time to time according to their adaptations, there would still be nothing like the systematic selection of the best and suppression of the poorest, which is perfecting the lower animals. How much progress would the horse-breeders expect to make if they were only at liberty to bring their animals together in exclusive pairs?
“As we have already intimated, marriage ignores the great difference between the reproductive powers of the sexes, and restricts each man, whatever may be his potency and his value, to the amount of production of which one woman, chosen blindly, may be capable. And while this unnatural and unscientific restriction is theoretically equal for all, practically it discriminates against the best and in favor of the worst; for while the good man will be limited by his conscience to what the law allows, the bad men, free from moral check, will distribute his seed beyond the legal limits as widely as he dares.”
[He then proceeds to the question of incest]:
“As the general law of marriage forbids breeding from the best, so the special law and public opinion against consanguineous marriages forbids breeding in and in. And as there is no sure line of demarcation between incest and the allowable degrees of consanguinity in marriage, the tendency of high-toned moralists is generally to extend the domain of the law of incest, and so make all approach to scientific propagation as difficult as possible. Thus there have been movements in various quarters within a few years to place marrying a deceased wife’s sister under the ban of law; and the State of New Hampshire has quite recently forbidden the marriage of first cousins as incestuous.”
[And, characteristically fearless, he defends polygamy and libertinage]:
“It is curious to observe that while the law of scientific propagation on the one hand thus criticizes some of the holiest institutions and sects, on the other it finds traces of good in some of the vilest forms of existing society. For instance, polygamy, so far as the fact of obtaining and supporting many wives implies that a man is superior to his fellows, is an approximation at least to nature’s wild form of breeding from the best, which is more than can be said of monogamic marriage. Again, slavery is always more or less a system of control over propagation; and so far as the interest of masters lead to selection, like that practiced in animal-breeding, it tends to the elevation of the subject race. Probably the negroes have risen in the scale of being faster than their masters, for the same reason that horses and cattle under man’s control rise faster than man himself. Even common licentiousness, cursed as it is, is sometimes not without compensations in the light of the propagative law. It is very probable that the feudal custom which gave barons the first privilege of every marriage among their retainers, base and oppressive though it was, actually improved the blood of the lower classes. We see that Providence frequently allows very superior men to be also very attractive to women, and very licentious. Perhaps with all the immediate evil that they do to morals they do some good to the blood of after generations. Who can say how much the present race of men in Connecticut owe to the numberless adulteries and fornications of Pierrepont Edwards? Corrupt as he was, he must have distributed a good deal of the blood of his noble father, Jonathan Edwards; and so we may hope the human race got a secret profit out of him.[5] Such are the compensations of nature and Providence.”
Surprisingly, for the man who imposed such tyranny over the affections, he states the first qualification of the institutions which are to supplant marriage, whoredom, and casual breeding: “They must not lessen human liberty.” It is hard to see what he means by that.
With scientific propagation Noyes had completed his work. He had made perfection permanent by making it transmissible. He had banished Death by abolishing the elements in human society by which Death was caused. The trace of mysticism is evident, but Noyes was not speaking mystically when he said that “the death system must be abolished.” He was merely summing up his earthly labors. In the preceding account of religious beliefs, it was noted that the Perfectionist, being identified with Christ, partakes of Christ’s victory over Death. At first Noyes claimed only that the believer dies and rises again spiritually. Later he added the mystical idea that the believer, although he may “pass through the form of death,” will not really die. Professor Warfield calls this a “sad concession to the appearance of things,” but Noyes would not have held it so. Partaking of Christ’s nature was a reality to him. The death through which Christ passed is one of the limitations of earthly law which cannot touch those beyond death. To abolish death utterly: “First we abolish sin, then shame, then the curse on woman of exhausting child-bearing, then the curse on man of exhausting labor,” and so, by the religion of Perfectionism, by the ascending fellowship and free love, by Male Continence, and by communism in labor and property, are removed all the antecedents of death and “we arrive regularly at the tree of life.” The syllabus is re-stated: “Reconciliation with God opens the way for the reconciliation of the sexes, emancipates woman, and opens the way for vital society. Vital society increases strength, diminishes work, and makes labor attractive, thus removing the antecedents of death.” It is a grandiose structure. It accounts for itself in every particular. It satisfies certain essential needs of man and sets him into relation with the Infinite. The success of Oneida is to be admired, not to be wondered at.
It is no belittlement of that success to record the practical end of the Community. It had become, by the end of the 1870’s, an extremely prosperous business concern with a reputation for integrity such as the Rappites had in their day. Materialistic critics have pointed out the many ways in which Noyes’ theories adapted themselves to the typical American life of making money. In his own book on American Socialisms, Noyes singled out eight communities whose organization he praised. Every one of them rejected marriage and, although he complicated instead of rejecting it, he still held firm to the great principle of forbidding private attachments. The canalized love of young people, the constant pressure of steadier elements, the absence of private ownership, the communal care for the education of children, the acceptance of these children into full membership so that there could be no cares for their future—all these made for a strongly knit unity of life, for a single ambition, the good of the community, which was interpreted as the success of the workshops. Even the two final principles, continence and selective propagation, served the community, by limiting the number of children born and by improving the stock of the future owners of Oneida. (Actually only a few unplanned-for children were born.)
Writing a dozen years after the col
ony changed its system, Anita Newcomb McGee said that one-fourth of the adult communists were living in pairs for weeks and months at a time, had children, and were inspired with “the Spirit of Monogamy”—the old solidarity vanished “and each desired a mate.” This is hardly credible, for the colony held together until outside forces broke down its marriage system; then only it dispersed.
For six years, Professor John W. Mears of Hamilton College had been tirelessly demanding legislative action against the community. He led a committee of seven, appointed by the Presbyterian Synod of Central New York, “to confer with other religious bodies” on “further measures” against Oneida; and lectured on the subject before other organizations, winning resolutions condemning the community and agitating a public opinion which was at best skeptical of Oneida’s morality. In 1879, forty-seven hostile critics, including Mears and Bishop Huntington, were gathered at Syracuse. As they entered the hall of their deliberations a printed statement was handed to each. In it Noyes made these points:
“The Communists had always been peaceable subjects of civil authority no seditious act ever having been charged upon them; that they had never proposed to carry out their peculiar principles in defiance of the laws or of the public opinion of their neighbors; and if special legislation should be obtained unfavorable to them they would still be faithful to their record in submission to ‘the powers that be.’ In all this the Communists, it affirmed, were the very antipodes of the Mormons, as they also were in their social theory and practice, there being more analogy and more practical sympathy between them and the Shakers than between them and the followers of Joseph Smith.”
The Stammering Century Page 25
