On the 26th of August—six days after the “high tide of the flesh”—the Community, in full assembly, read and accepted the following proposals of their founder:
“I need hardly remind the Community that we have always claimed freedom of conscience to change our social practices, and have repeatedly offered to abandon the offensive part of our system of communism if so required by public opinion. We have lately pledged ourselves in our publications to loyally obey any new legislation which may be instituted against us. Many of you will remember that I have frequently said within the last year that I did not consider our present social arrangements an essential part of our profession as Christian Communists, and that we shall probably have to recede from them sooner or later. I think the time has come for us to act on these principles of freedom, and I offer for your consideration the following modifications of our practical platform. I propose:
“1. That we give up the practice of complex marriage, not as renouncing belief in the principles and prospective finality of that institution, but in deference to the public sentiment which is evidently rising against it.
“2. That we place ourselves not on the platform of the Shakers, on the one hand, nor of the world on the other, but on Paul’s platform which allows marriage but prefers celibacy . . . To carry out this change, it will be necessary first of all that we should go into a new and earnest study of the 7th chapter, 1 Cor., in which Paul fully defines his position, and also that of the Lord Jesus Christ, in regard to the sexual relations proper for the Church in the presence of worldly institutions. If you accept these modifications, the Community will consist of two distinct classes—the married and the celibate—both legitimate, but the last preferred.
“What will become of communism after these modifications, may be defined thus:
“1. We shall hold our property and businesses in common, as now.
“2. We shall live together in a common household and eat at a common table, as now.
“3. We shall have a common children’s department as now.
“4. We shall have our daily evening meetings, and all of our present means of moral and spiritual improvement.
“Surely here is communism enough to hold us together and inspire us with heroism for a new career. With the breeze of general goodwill in our favor, which even Professor Mears has promised us on the condition of our giving up the ‘immoral features’ of our system, what new wonders of success may we not hope for in the years to come?
“For my part, I think we have great cause to be thankful for the toleration which has so long been accorded to our audacious experiment. Especially are we indebted to the authorities and people of our immediate neighborhood for kindness and protection. It will be a good and gracious thing for us to relieve them at last of the burden of our unpopularity, and show the world that Christian Communism has self-control and flexibility enough to live and flourish without complex marriage.
“J. H. NOYES.”
Complex marriage was at an end. “From the present date,” says the resolution, “the Community will consist of two classes of members, namely, celibates, or those who prefer to live a life of sexual abstinence, and the married who practice only the sexual freedom which strict monogamy allows. The Community will now look for the sympathy and encouragement which have been so liberally promised in case this change should ever be made.”
It is said that, with infinite contempt for the legal marriage relation, Noyes led his flock into their great hall and lining the men and women up on opposite sides of the room, ordered them to count off. When the count was concluded, he paired the corresponding numbers and so satisfied the claims of a monogamic society. On somewhat better authority, I have heard that one woman was unpaired at the end of Oneida and resented it for the rest of her life. With the end of community in persons came an end to communism in property. Oneida was skillfully translated into a joint stock company. Some of the members stayed. A few followed Noyes to Canada. The others scattered. In 1886 the perfect Communist, who founded a great American business and abolished death, died self-exiled from his community, but undisturbed in his faith.
[1] In one of the Oneida publications of 1850, the significance of the two “tides” is marked by an appropriate essay on capital punishment: “Our almanac for this season, always shows stormy, tempestuous weather on the spiritual main. After about this date, the weather begins to clear up,—the flesh tide ebbs rapidly—navigation becomes safe and easy—enterprise starts with new life, and we find ourselves sailing buoyantly on the calm, open sea of spirituality about the last of winter. This climax of the flesh the present year, could not be signalized more appropriately, than by the execution of Webster, the ‘Supreme Scoundrel,’ and special representative of sensuality. Our community unanimously consent to this judgement of the flesh, and rejoice that there is a Commonwealth and executive power, that can show so much sympathy with God’s indignation against the workers of iniquity.”
[2] Later, until her death by drowning in the Hudson, Mrs. Cragin acted as matron of the Oneida Community.
[3] Yet in 1837 before Oneida had been founded, he renounced his allegiance to the United States. He alludes to this in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison quoted on page 246.
[4] Noyes later noted that the sawmill crops up in nearly every American community.
[5] It is possible that the persistence of the legend that ministers’ sons are all wastrels can be traced back to the careers of Aaron Burr and Pierrepont Edwards. I have made no special effort to unearth the details of the latter’s life. In the literature of the period following his death there are many references like the one above; and even encyclopedias speak of his dissolute habits, but obscurely and without references to sources.
†Until 1834 every citizen of Massachusetts had to contribute to the support of some religious sect. Ministers with unsure livings were afraid to support unpopular causes. †The drift to the cities became marked in the 1830’s and one of the attractions of New York was the Siamese Twins, †People said, “Don’t you take?” in the sense of “get the point?” †Silver forks came in and also the balanced knife handle to keep the blade off the cloth, “a little thing, but very promotive of cleanliness.” †The reaper was perfected and the first horticultural society was founded. †In 1832, Frederick Tudor was sending ice from Massachusetts to the southern states, Brazil, and to Calcutta for Lord William Bentinck and the nabobs of the India Company. †Railroad construction gangs were made up chiefly of Irishmen paid from forty to seventy-five cents a day, with their meals and six drinks of whiskey daily. †In 1836, Love joy was killed by anti-abolitionists at Alton, Illinois. †In the same year there was a mad speculation in building lots in Manhattan, many of them known as “water lots.”
†The city of Lowell, named after a manufacturer of cotton, was built as a complete factory town and, before it was paved, 5,000 young women and a thousand men were already at work. †In Ohio there was an “utter aversion to ministers trading in horse flesh” and settlers there united to do violence to land speculators. †In 1832, a steamer landed troops in Chicago and, eight years later, the first Cunarder, the Britannia, arrived in Boston. †In 1835, Colt’s rotating chambered gun breech was patented. †In 1829, a scandal was caused in New York by the public examination of a girl in the subject of Geometry, “the clergy, as usual, prophesying the dissolution of all family bonds.” †In 1835, was circulated the first petition for property rights for women; the marriage by contract of Robert Dale Owen was sneered at, and the phrase “committed matrimony” was in use. †The “backwoods” were no longer known by that name and “eastern exquisites” visited Lexington and Louisville. The country suffered a flood of European critics. †The American business man was already tired—of making money. †By 1832 “The campaigns against Black Hawk and Madame Trollope are over, and both have ceased to be objects of editorial concern. And there are no new Lions—The steam engine— march of mind—spirit of the age, above all ‘the West’—�
�the Far West’—‘the great West,’ those standard topics of newspaper paragraphs, have had their praises exhausted, and ‘delight no more.’” †Mr. Barnum was exhibiting Tom Thumb.
XI. Reformer and Radical.
IN the autumn of 1840, Emerson wrote to Carlyle, “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new Community in his waistcoat pocket.” It was the great era of criticism and of change. It began when William Miller was predicting the immediate end of the world, and seven years later, just as Mr. Greeley’s London correspondent was writing “Workers of the World, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,” most of the experiments had ended. “Mad-men, and women, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Unitarians, and Philosophers” were seen by Emerson in those catch-alls of radicalism, Reform Conventions. He held aloof; he reproved; he disliked their enthusiasm for helping everybody and changing everything but themselves; and he was, in a strange way, their inspiration. Whatever broke from the established order could justify itself by some sentence from his rattling essays. He thought that Fourier was magnanimous[1] and inspired; but he refrained from joining the great experiments at his very door, benignly sending blessings to the esthetes at Brook Farm and to the philosophers at Fruitlands, or paying an austere, friendly visit, and returning to Concord to write coldly in his journal about ideas without hands or feet. The experimenters admired him, envied him, wanted him with them, and reproached him for his indifference. The eternal injustice of man to man left him unmoved, and only some salient act of ungenerosity, some ignobility in human dealings, could stir him to action. When he finally spoke, as he did on slavery, his utterance was momentous but, in the general run of events, he stood aside because his mind was occupied with other things. The radicals about him professed their indifference to wealth and social position, and were infuriated by poverty or snobbism; Emerson managed to be indifferent to both. To the reforming enthusiast he said, “Why so hot, my little man?” To the altruist, asking contributions, he wanted to say, “Are they my poor?”, and to withhold his dollar. If wealth was not important, as they all agreed, how could the lack of it signify greatly? There were more pressing obligations on the true man than the duty to amass coin or the necessity of preventing poverty. To know the moral order of the universe was one of these graver tasks, to come into harmony with it, to turn inward and to trust one’s self. The kindest word he has is for Alcott, who believed that all social and political changes were fruitless, since they shifted evil from one place to another, and that personal reform, a change in the individual, bringing him closer to the order of Nature, alone could eradicate evil.
Emerson, consequently, is the prophet of the next generation of reformers: the prophets of the will; the priests of the sinless religion based not on Christ but on self; the mind healers, and optimists, and teachers of self-confidence in fourteen lessons; the mystics of success. When we come to them, we see how, out of the vast range of Emerson’s ideas, and out of his high conceptions of the gentleman and the man, they managed, by skillful selection, to create the bounder with an aggressive ego and how, out of a lofty mysticism, they drew a silly one. From that, at least, the radicals of his own time were deterred by his severe presence and by his hostility. They drew from him a single encouragement: to trust themselves against society. In some of his most impressive sentences he spoke of divine justice: “It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles for evermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.” That type of retribution they understood, for they all believed themselves instinctively at one with nature, and privy to its secret intentions. They could trust themselves, because they—and they alone—trusted nature.
The radicals of the 1840’s and after created the type-radical of our own time. The changes which words undergo have confused us somewhat for, in 1840, the radical was called a reformer and, in 1928, the reformer is not a radical and the radical is called a Red. In 1914, before Prohibition and Bolshevism had blurred the picture in the back of our minds, the radical was, in our imagination, a comparatively harmless crank, given to fads, strolling about in white garments, eating nuts, talking of love and beauty. He was, in reality, already turning into something harder and more dangerous to settled convictions, but the cartoonist lagged a little behind the fact, and we still thought of the radical as he was in 1840. The reformer, meanwhile, had undergone another transformation. In 1840, that name was given to the lofty soul who, at the risk of martyrdom, was ready to lay the ax at the root of every human institution:
“The trump of reform,” wrote the Dial in 1841, “is sounding throughout the world for a revolution of all human affairs. The issue we cannot doubt; yet the crises are not without alarm. Already is the ax laid at the root of that spreading tree, whose trunk is idolatry, whose branches are covetousness, war, and slavery, whose blossom is concupiscence, whose fruit is hate. Planted by Beelzebub, it shall be rooted up. Reformers are metallic; they are sharpest steel; they pierce whatsoever of evil or abuse they touch. Their souls are attempered in the fires of heaven; they are mailed in the might of principles, and God backs their purpose. They uproot institutions, erase traditions, revise usages, and renovate all things. They are the noblest of facts. Extant in time, they work for eternity; dwelling with men, they are with God.”
So he stood, ax uplifted, at the threshold of the Gilded Age, and the age paralyzed his arm. In 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, the radical-reformer—the ultraist as he was called—had reached the end of his tether. In that notable success was the seed of his failure, for it meant that the most extreme of radical measures had succeeded without destroying society, and without much aid, even, from the radicals. Until 1860, the infidel, the suffragist, the Perfectionist, the experimenter in Communities, all were somehow tolerated by society provided they were not also Abolitionists. Abolition was the Bolshevism of that time in the North as well as in the South. The opponents of slavery avoided Garrison because he prejudiced their cause, their compromises, their projects for restoring the negro to Africa. Our school histories have given us the picture of a North of Abolitionists and a South devoted to the “peculiar institution.” We reject the bitter facts that neither Lincoln nor his party was in favor of abolition; that both might have made slavery permanent to save the Union; that New England mobbed anti-slavery meetings; that liberals of all types avoided the taint of Abolitionism; that Love joy was not killed by a true southern mob; that only a pitiful handful of fanatics voted for an abolitionist president; that Quakers and New England Congregationalists supported slavery; that to all right-thinking people John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison were anathema; and that a good Bostonian shrank from being seen even with so eminent a negro as the orator, Frederick Douglass. The Abolitionist was the arch-enemy of established society. When his cause was carried by the accident of a war which he did not inspire, all other causes were shaken. It should not have been so: one triumph should have led to others, and might have done so if the field of operations had not changed. Causes went into politics. After the Civil War we see a succession of third parties with programs of social reform. And as the scandals of the age rose out of economic exploitation protected by politics, the reformer, too, had to shift his ground.
Beginning with the ’70’s, the personal reform of temperance was transformed into the political reform of prohibition, and the radical-reformer of the 1840’s reappeared, a decade later, as the protagonist of honesty in politics, to be followed closely by the muck-raker and eventually by the Progressive. The radical element in the reformer had separated out of the composition. By fissure, the man of the 1840’s had become two: the radical attached to abstract ideas, the reformer attached to politics. The return of Roosevelt to orderly
Republicanism, the liberal enthusiasm for Wilson and the Peace, put an end to that type of reformer. But, in the meantime, another had risen, antipodal in every superficial respect to the reformer of 1840, yet psychologically close to him. The keyword of 1840 was “abolish”; of 1900 “improve”; of 1926 “prohibit.” At the moment it seems that only the last was successful.
The early radical-reformer was, strangely enough, a sympathizer with the supposed motive of the modern prohibitionist; that is, he usually disliked liquor in all its forms. What he would have despised utterly is the prohibitionist’s method; for the 1840 radical was not a legalist, and his way of banishing liquor was a transcendental kind of local option. Association was another key-word of the time (Alcott preferred Con-sociation); and when an association was made, a colony founded, the members could banish liquor and tobacco if they chose, and any new member would naturally accept the laws of the Community in that respect as he did in respect to property or wives. The radicals corresponded in time to the Washingtonian Movement, the great effort to impress temperance on Americans through the testimony of reformed drunkards. This movement was as personal as the Anti-Saloon League was impersonal. It required a moral conversion, and it offered individual happiness, invoking no law but the moral law, appointing no bureaucracy, and carrying on no lobby. This was the typical movement of the time, trusting to moral suasion, appealing to the individual, and involving no compulsion. It wanted to abolish the drunkard without abolishing the drink. The communist experiments of the same time wanted to abolish private property and unequal wages—for themselves. The vegetarians desired an end to the universal wrong done to animals, but their chief aim was to persuade people to stop incorporating the flesh of beasts into their own bodies. The suffragists demanded the right to vote; they did not try to take that right away from any man. Only the Abolitionist pure and simple attacked a right or a privilege and he, too, worked on the basis of equality, for he did not propose to let the black man keep the white man as slave. To abolish a pernicious institution, and then to leave men and women to their own devices, was the ideal of the libertarian radical, and whatever institution he founded or approved was one which protected liberty.
The Stammering Century Page 26
