For a brief period New Harmony was the communistic capital of the world.  It was discussed everywhere and became, says its chronicler, “the rendezvous of the enlightened and progressive people from all over the United States and northern Europe.”  It achieved a sort of motley cosmopolitanism.  A “Boat Load of Knowledge” carried from Pittsburgh the most distinguished group of scientists that had hitherto been brought together in America.  It included William Maclure, a Scotchman who came to America, at the age of thirty-three, ambitious to make a geological survey of the country and whose learning and energy soon earned him the title of “Father of American Geology”; Thomas Say, “the Father of American Zooelogy”; Charles Alexander Lesueur, a distinguished naturalist from the Jardin des Plantes of Paris; Constantine S. Rafinesque, a scientific nomad whose studies of fishes took him everywhere and whose restless spirit forbade him remaining long anywhere; Gerard Troost, a Dutch scientist who later did pioneer work in western geology; Joseph Neef, a well-known Pestalozzian educator, together with two French experts in that system; and Owen’s four brilliant sons.  A few artists and musicians and all sorts of reformers, including Fanny Wright, an ardent and very advanced suffragette, joined these scientists in the new Eden.  Owen had issued a universal invitation to the “industrious and well disposed,” but his project offered also the lure of a free meal ticket for the improvident and the glitter of novelty for the restless.

“I am come to this country,” Owen said in his opening words at New Harmony, “to introduce an entire new state of society, to change it from the ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system, which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contests between individuals."[19] But the germs of dissolution were already present in the extreme individuality of the members of this new society.  Here was no homogeneous horde of docile German peasants waiting to be commanded.  What Father Rapp could do, Owen could not.  The sifting process had begun too late.  Seven different constitutions issued in rapid succession attempted in vain to discover a common bond of action.  In less than two years Owen’s money was gone, and nine hundred or more disillusioned persons rejoined the more individualistic world.  Many of them subsequently achieved distinction in professional and public callings.  Owen’s widely advertised experiment was fecund, however, and produced some eleven other short-lived communistic attempts, of which the most noted were at Franklin, Haverstraw, and Coxsackie in New York, Yellow Springs and Kendal in Ohio, and Forestville and Macluria in Indiana.