Religious Fanaticism
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domestic situation began to overtax our nerves, we lost a portion of our spiritual enthusiasm, firmness and patience.
Moreover love, the great disturber of community life, came their way.
'Notwithstanding our vigilance' he reports, ' there arose in our-midst during the year 1853 a case of marital infidelity and illicit intercourse that caused great unpleasantness, perplexity and scandal, and that required at length Community intervention.
The story is simply this:
One of our male members, the head of a family, became enamoured of a woman, also a member, who had for some time resided in his household, and proportionally estranged from his faithful and worthy wife.
Suspicion of something wrong arose among outsiders, causing considerable talk of a scurrilous nature, though nothing was absolutely known.
At length the unhappiness of the wife was revealed, and the cause of it, upon investigation, made public.
The matter then very properly received attention from the Council, who summoned the delinquents before them for examination and discipline.
Upon being questioned and confronted with proof of misconduct, they acknowledged culpability, professed regret and penitence, and promised amendment.
But these professions proved insincere, or at least transient, and the parties were again called to account.
They then did not deny or attempt to conceal their criminality, but rather justified it on the ground that it was consonant with the principles of the new philosophy concerning personal liberty, sexual relations and the conjugal bond which they had embraced—in a word, they openly
THE OWEN
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and unhesitatingly avowed themselves to be Free Lovers, from conviction and in practice also.
Having taken that position they could not do otherwise than withdraw from the Community membership and leave the locality where both their theory and their action were held in almost universal derision and abhorrence.'
This affair did not disrupt Hopedale, but it disturbed the members ; and in the same year an even more unsettling—though decidedly more original—difficulty arose.
It was the custom of the Community to allow each member fifty cents a day, and over and above this to pay by the hour for useful work done for the common good.
One of the members, Brother Lamson by name, made the suggestion that nursing mothers should be paid as least as much as was paid for any other work, and, his wife having a baby just at that time, he further announced that their job involved, at the mildest, a sixteen-hour day.
Payment on this scale would have given the mothers just twice the money earned by skilled workmen, and the principles of the Community could not expand to admit this idea.
Fifty cents a day was all they were granted, and Brother Lamson and his family retired.
After this difficulties and disagreements multiplied, and Hopedale, like the others, ended in confusion.
The end had not been evident in 1844, and in that year thirteen similar communities had been started, namely :
Brooke's Experiment, Ceresco, or the Wisconsin Phalanx, Claremont, the Clarkson Industrial Association, the Grand Prairie Community, the Iowa Pioneer Phalanx,
RELIGIOUS FANATICISM
Leraysville, Mixville, the Ontario and Ohio Phalanxes, Prairie Home, Sodus Bay, and the Trumbull Phalanx.
In the following year only three were opened: the Columbian Phalanx, the Integral Phalanx, and the Sangamon Phalanx ; and after that only a few scattered, forlorn hopes ; the Spring Farm Association (1846),
Garden Grove (1848), and the Raritan Bay Union of 1853.
Each one of these experiments, which are now but queer-sounding names, stands for a failure, for shattered hopes and wasted money, and for the disillusionment of eager idealists.
"The four great evils with which the world is afflicted', the Wisconsin Phalanx announced in 1845, ' intoxication, lawsuits, quarrelling and profane swearing, never have and never can find admittance into our society'.
But alas! these evils were too strong.
Some of the societies prospered a little more than others, and some lasted a few years; but all alike ended in disappointment, and, amid their ruins, the Fourierite
Movement melted away.
CTA Fal b Rooval
THE SWEDENBORGIAN SPIRITUALISTS
ae: the failure of the Fourierite Movement, the rage for Utopias somewhat died down.
After 1846 there were, indeed, a number of small non-religious experiments, many of them carried on by undiscouraged enthusiasts who had been through the Owen or Fourier mills ; but they none of them attracted any wide following.
The first was the Altruist Community on the Mississippi, which was made up of the remains of the North American Phalanx, but had no surer hold on life.
Then came Josiah Warren, one of the original members of New Harmony, who, in 1851 struck out a line of his own.
He learnt a lesson from the failure of the communistic idea, and flew to the opposite extreme and became a rampant individualist.
His first experiment was a ' Time Store' where he sold goods in exchange for a mixture of money and 'labour notes'.
The idea was that he should take the actual money cost of the goods, plus a small percentage for cost of storage, and that his own time should be given in exchange for the time spent by others upon useful work.
The labour notes were for periods of from five minutes to an hour, and they were marked with the value the worker put upon his own labour—a matter which caused a good deal of dispute.
The
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women who dealt at the store put a value upon their house work as high as the men put upon their own, and Mr. Warren did not complain of that ; but there were some who debased their own currency by issuing to themselves too many notes, and the system was difficult to adjust.
After two years of this complicated book-keeping Mr. Warren founded a small settlement called, without disguise, 'Utopia', and there he tried with three or four families to carry out a plan of Equitable
Commerce.
This not succeeding according to his hopes, he started again in 1851 ata place called Modern Times, on Long Island, where the plan of bartering services against commodities without the use of money was still further elaborated, and was combined with the fullest freedom to experiment in dress and marriage.
But even Modern Times grew out of date, and nothing came of the movement.
In 1851 two small Colonies were founded called Bethel and Berlin Heights, the second largely made up of the remnants of the first.
Little is known of them beyond the common countryside rumour that they were free-love colonies, and they seem to have left no record of their peculiarities or beliefs.
No wholesale migration of foreign religious sects seems to have come to the Promised Land after the early years of the century, but several secular, and one or two religious prophets turned their footsteps thither.
In 1850, for example, a considerable movement arose at Nauvoo, the town from which the Mormons had just started on their great trek to Utah.
This movement af
THE SWEDENBORGIAN
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called itself 'rationalistic democratic', and was entirely composed of French people.
Its leader, Etienne Cabet, came to America in 1848 and tried to found a small colony at Red River, Texas, but owing to yellow fever and other external difficulties it did not flourish.
In 1850 or '51, however, he succeeded in making a better start at Nauvoo with 1500 people, among whom community of goods and compulsory marriage were the rule.
'This colony seems to have quarrelled as much as, if not more than any of the others, and in 1856 poor Cabet was himself expelled, and died with a broken heart a few weeks later.
Offshoots of the movement were set up at Icaria in Iowa, and later in California ; but none of them were harmonious, and all were wound up before 1895.
Cedar Vale Community in Kansas began and ended its life in 1871.
It was composed of Russians, who called themselves 'Progressive', and allowed their members to believe what they pleased, except that a "hygienic doctor' and a 'reformed clergyman' were provided.
Three years later an American ' Social Freedom Community ' arose at Chesterfield, Va, intended to prove the importance of * Having no religion and no bye-laws, and rejecting the idea of man's total depravity'.
It did not succeed in vindicating these ideas any better than the communities which were overwhelmed with constitutions.
there came to America a pleasanter colony, a group of the young Polish intelligentsia, who believed that they could live almost without working upon the richness of Californian land.
They
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settled at Anaheim, and for one happy year, until their money was gone, they made music, acted plays, discussed philosophy, smoked cigarettes and ate Californian peaches.
Then they went home again, disappointed, but not particularly disillusioned, to their native land.
Other colonies with curious names and ancient ideas arose at other dates.
There were Tobolampo in Mexico (1886-1891), and the Ruskin Commonwealths in Tennessee (1894-1899), and many more.
But those of the end of the century are too recent, and too far removed from the phenomena we are considering to be relevant to our story.
Religious attempts to reform the ways of the world went on at the same time as these secular experiments.
There was Andreas Bernardus Smilnikar, an Austrian professor, who ' perceived that the signs of the times corresponded with the prophecies of the Bible, and that the time was at hand for the foundation of the universal peace which was promised to all nations'.
Acting on this idea he went to America in 1838, and travelled over the country announcing that he was ' the Ambassador
Extraordinary of Christ, and the Apostle of Peace'. He found people to believe him, and presently established a small German-speaking colony called the Peace Union settlement, which lasted for nearly a year.
In 1852 a Second Adventist preacher named Peter Armstrong made an attempt to lead 144,000 saints into the Wilderness to await the coming of the Lord.
He bought 2500 acres of stony land in the Alleghenny Mountains, deeded the land to God with all the legal
THE SWEDENBORGIAN
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formalities available in the State, named it 'Celesta', and settled there with his wife and seven children.
Instead of working the land, which in view of the immanent end of the world was hardly necessary, he edited a newspaper, ' The Day Star of Zion', which he claimed had thousands of readers; and as the years went on a few foolish people really did join him in his retreat.
Quarrels arose, however, and he was accused of being crazy ; and some of his supporters turned against him, and exposed his errors in the other Second
Adventist papers (of which there were three or four in the 'sixties) and gradually they all drifted away from him.
After his death his sons had some difficulty in claiming the land, because of the deed of gift which Peter Armstrong had executed ; but ultimately they succeeded, and all traces of Celesta faded away.
These isolated and pathetic attempts to inaugurate a new era were of little general interest at the time, and are still less important now ; but the Swedenborgian
Spiritualist Movement of the same date was much more considerable, and had a recognizable influence upon the thought of the period.
One of the necessities of a movement in the United States, if it was to attract American adherents, was that it should appear to be either of native origin or so much modified and improved by transportation to America as to be as good.
Owen, indeed, had been able to make no such pretence, but his enthusiastic admiration for the country and all its institutions perhaps did as well ; and the Fourierites, though they were following a