In shrewd and capable hands, the sect soon had both an elaborate system of theology based upon the teachings of Mother Ann and also an effective organization.  The communal life, ordaining celibacy, based on industry, and constructed in the strictest economy, achieved material prosperity and evidently brought spiritual consolation to those who committed themselves to its isolation.  Although originating in England, the sect is confined wholly to America and has from the first recruited its membership almost wholly from native Americans.

Another of these social experiments was the Oneida Community and its several ephemeral branches.  Though it was of American origin and the members were almost wholly American, it deserves passing mention.  The founder, John Humphrey Noyes, a graduate of Dartmouth and a Yale divinity student, conceived a system of communal life which should make it possible for the individual to live without sin.  This perfectionism, he believed, necessitated the abolition of private property through communism, the abolition of sickness through complete cooeperation of the individual with God, and the abolition of the family through a “scientific” cooeperation of the sexes.  The Oneida Community was financially very prosperous.  Its “stirpiculture,” Noyes’s high-sounding synonym for free love, brought it, however, into violent conflict with public opinion, and in 1879 “complex marriages” gave way to monogamous families.  In the following year the communistic holding of property gave way to a joint stock company, under whose skillful management the prosperity of the community continues today.

The American Utopias based upon an assumed economic altruism were much more numerous than those founded primarily upon religion but, as they were recruited almost wholly from Americans, they need engage our attention only briefly.  There were two groups of economic communistic experiments, similar in their general characteristics but differing in their origin.  One took its inspiration directly from Robert Owen, the distinguished philanthropist and successful cotton manufacturer of Scotland; the other from Fourier, the noted French social philosopher.

In 1825 Robert Owen purchased New Harmony, Rapp’s village in Indiana and its thirty thousand appurtenant acres.  When Owen came to America he was already famous.  Great throngs flocked to hear this practical man utter the most visionary sentiments.  At Washington, for instance, he lectured to an auditory that included great senators and famous representatives, members of the Supreme Court and of the Cabinet, President Monroe and Adams, the President-elect.  He displayed to his eager hearers the plans and specifications of the new human order, his glorified apartment house with all the external paraphernalia of selective human perfection drawn to scale.