In February, 1848, sixty-nine young men, all carefully selected volunteers, were sent forth from Havre as the vanguard of the contemplated exodus.  But the movement was halted by the turn of great events.  Twenty days after the young men sailed, the French Republic was proclaimed, and in the fervor and distraction of this immediate political victory the new and distant Utopia seemed to thousands less alluring than it had been before.  The group of young volunteers, however, reached America.  After heart-rending disillusionment in the swamps and forests of Louisiana and on the raw prairies of Texas, they made their way back to New Orleans in time to meet Cabet and four hundred Icarians, who arrived early in 1849.  The Gallic instinct for factional differences soon began to assert itself in repeated division and subdivision on the part of the idealists.  One-half withdrew at New Orleans to work out their individual salvation.  The remainder followed Cabet to the deserted Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois, where vacant houses offered immediate shelter and where they enjoyed an interval of prosperity.  The French genius for music, for theatricals, and for literature relieved them from the tedium that characterized most co-operative colonies.  Soon their numbers increased to five hundred by accessions which, with few exceptions, were French.

But Cabet was not a practical leader.  His pamphlet published in German in 1854, entitled If I had half a million dollars, reveals the naivete of his mind.  He wanted to find money, not to make it.  The society soon became involved in a controversy in which Cabet’s immediate following were outnumbered.  The minority petulantly stopped working but continued to eat.  “The majority decided that those who would not work should not eat ... and gave notice that those who absented themselves from labor would be cut off from rations."[20] As a result, Cabet, in 1856, was expelled from his own Icaria!  With 170 faithful adherents he went to St. Louis, and there a few days later he died.  The minority buried their leader, but their faith in communal life survived this setback.  At Cheltenham, a suburb of St. Louis, they acquired a small estate, where proximity to the city enabled the members to get work.  Here they lived together six years before division disrupted them permanently.

At Nauvoo in the meantime there had been other secessions, and the property, in 1857, was in the hands of a receiver.  The plucky and determined remnant, however, removed to Iowa, where on the prairie near Corning they planted a new Icaria.  Here, by hard toil and in extreme poverty, but in harmony and contentment, the communists lived until, in 1876, the younger members wished to adopt advanced methods in farming, in finance, and in management.  The older men, with wisdom acquired through bitter experience, refused to alter their methods.  The younger party won a lawsuit to annul the communal charter.  The property was divided, and again