Thy Neighbor's Wife, page 32
Free medical and dental care was provided by Oneida’s resident doctors; all clothing was made and repaired by the community’s tailors and dressmakers, milliners and cobblers; two and sometimes three meals a day were served in the mansion’s huge dining hall. In the basement of the mansion there was a Turkish bath, and on the spacious lawns of the 275-acre estate there were croquet courts and baseball diamonds. There was sailing and boat fishing on Oneida Lake, swimming in the pond, and musical and stage entertainment offered by Oneida’s twenty-two-piece orchestra and its drama company, and on weekends communal dances were held in the mansion’s ballroom.
Each child was required to attend the community school until the age of sixteen, and some of the more ambitious students were sent on to Yale and Columbia, where they were trained as physicians, lawyers, and engineers, and after graduation some of them returned to live and work within the expanding community. When Noyes believed that certain of Oneida’s young people were mature enough for their first sexual experience, community women volunteered to share their beds with teenaged boys, while Noyes or other older men of his choosing would indoctrinate the female virgins. In addition to pleasing the older people, Noyes believed that this system offered the young the benefit of more experienced lovers—and, since the older males had already proven themselves faithful to Noyes’s policy of “male continence,” there was little chance of unwanted pregnancies. Although the younger members would also be permitted to enjoy sex within their age group, there was constant community pressure against any sign of “exclusive” love. Like everything else in the community, one’s body was to be shared; possessiveness of any kind was considered contrary to the community spirit and the will of God.
In the nurseries and playrooms, young children learned early that they had no proprietary claim to any specific toy; all the toys were to be shared, and after it was noticed by the supervisors that several little girls were becoming attached to certain dolls, preening them, talking to them, and taking them to bed at night, efforts were made to repress the infant mimicking of the traditional role of motherhood. The girls were reminded that dolls were false fabrications of life, and that such preoccupations did not honor the ideals of Oneida womanhood.
The leading women of Oneida did not regard a female’s primary purpose in life to be childbirth and domesticity; agreeing with Noyes that married women in the outside world too often became “propagative drudges,” the Oneida women saw their goals as spiritual growth, personal emancipation, and intellectual improvement. They were encouraged by Noyes to attend the adult education classes conducted nightly at the mansion, and to make use of the community’s 4,000-volume library. They wore short skirts and pantalets, bobbed their hair, and assumed a coequal status with the male members concerning community roles and duties. They took turns in factories, as did the men in the kitchen, and while they shared equally in the attention and affection shown to all the children of Oneida, they believed that the little girls’ predilection for dolls, those frilly wax figurines with painted faces whose costumes reflected the style of the outside world, advanced an undesirable spirit that should somehow be exorcised.
One woman, a teacher, recommended as a solution that all the dolls be gathered in a pile, stripped of their clothes, and laid on the fiery coals to be “burned up with a merry blaze.” After this suggestion was considered by the committee in charge of the children’s nursery and school, the children themselves were assembled to respond to the problem—and, with some encouragement from their elders, the little boys unanimously voted to burn the dolls, while the girls, though reluctant, finally concurred. One of the girls who surrendered her doll would recall in a memoir written many years later the scene of that dreadful day in 1851: “At the hour appointed, we all formed a circle round the stove, each girl carrying on her arm her long-cherished favorite, and marching in time to a song. As we came opposite the stove-door, we threw our dolls into the angry-looking flames, and saw them perish before our eyes.”
John Humphrey Noyes had personally consented to the burning—“the doll-spirit,” he asserted, “is a species of idolatry, and should be classed with the worship of graven images” and Noyes would have as easily banished from the community any human being who persisted in demonstrating acts of “exclusive” love, be it a mother toward her child or a romantic couple toward one another. “The new commandment,” Noyes wrote, “is that we love one another…not by pairs, as in the world, but en masse.” An obedient, God-fearing member of Oneida should not be deprived of love and attention because of the selfish bonding of blood relatives or the possessive passions of a particular couple; Noyes insisted: “Hearts must be free to love all of the true and worthy.” After a man had confessed to Noyes that he was hopelessly in love with one woman, Noyes impatiently commented: “You do not love her, you love happiness.”
John Humphrey Noyes’s unorthodox views on love and marriage were not the result of an unconventional boyhood, for the prominent and prosperous Vermont family into which he was born in 1811 in Brattleboro was in no manner eccentric. Noyes’s mother, Polly Hayes, was a gently reared intelligent woman who descended from the New England family that would produce the nineteenth President of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes; and his father, John Noyes, Sr., who had successively been a teacher (he had tutored Daniel Webster), a minister, and a successful businessman, was elected to Congress by the voters of southern Vermont when John Humphrey Noyes was four years old.
As a boy Noyes was popular with his peers, was vigorously drawn to outdoor living and sports, and was also a diligent student who, like his father, graduated with honors from Dartmouth College. Leaving the campus in 1830 intending to study law, Noyes became attracted instead to the dramatic flair and conviction of certain revivalist ministers who, near his home and throughout New England, in the name of God, were challenging the traditional interpretation of the Bible and were confronting in particular the Calvinistic doctrine on human unworthiness and the prevalence of sin and predestination. Some new ministers went so far as to suggest that people could, after a true conversion, rise above sin and achieve perfection on earth, a condition that not only appealed to vast audiences but also seemed feasible in this post-Revolutionary War period when all things seemed possible. It was a time of great enthusiasm and optimism in America; the young nation, having severed its official ties to the mother country, was now free to expand and explore deeper into its own wilderness and consciousness, reappraising its Puritan past and seeking control of its own destiny.
A man named Joseph Smith, the son of a poor New England farmer, had in 1827 claimed to have communicated with the angel Moroni, and as a result of this and other revelations Smith founded Mormonism and espoused polygamy—until in 1844 an angry mob broke into the Illinois jail where he was being detained, and killed him. Smith was succeeded as the prophet by a onetime house painter and glazier named Brigham Young, who moved the Mormons westward into Utah, where the religion flourished and allowed Young to support twenty-seven wives.
A Lutheran minister, George Rapp, had years before in Pennsylvania revealed a visit from the angel Gabriel, and he was thus inspired to gather around him more than eight hundred followers who lived and worked unselfishly and contentedly, while practicing celibacy, within an agricultural haven called Harmony.
A female communitarian and abolitionist of prosperous Scottish parentage named Frances Wright founded in 1826 near Memphis a community called Nashoba, a 2,000-acre farm on which blacks and whites worked together and were allowed to sleep together—and many did until word of their sexual mingling spread through the countryside and provoked controversies that, together with the continued unprofitability of the farm itself, induced the group to disband in 1830. In addition to her opposition to slavery, Frances Wright was also known for her lectures and writings critical of organized religion and the institution of marriage. “In wedded life,” she declared, “the woman sacrifices her independence and becomes part of the property of her husband.”
Similar views on marriage were often expressed during the mid-1800s by other female activists as well as by ordinary women who dwelled in small free-love communes that existed in New York State and New England, and in such towns as Berlin Heights, Ohio. Freedom between the sexes was sometimes also encouraged within the “Fourieristic” settlements, which were gatherings of people who sought Utopia not through communism, but through capitalism, being inspired by the writings of a whimsically idealistic but almost impecunious French aristocrat named Charles Fourier.
Before his death in Paris in 1837, Fourier had lectured and published works asserting that nineteenth-century man’s inherent greed and destructive nature could not be curtailed and made compatible with the highest goals of world capitalism unless the system of Western civilization was radically altered. Fourier proposed that national leaders divide the populations of their lands into separate groups numbering approximately 1,600 people, each group living and working within a kind of grand industrial hotel, or “phalanstery,” that would fulfill all of a citizen’s private and professional needs.
Ideally each phalanstery would be six stories high, cheerfully decorated and comfortably furnished, with separate wings for work enterprises and other wings for social or domestic activities. While regents would supervise the income earning within each phalanstery, individuals would perform at jobs that they did best, though they periodically would be rotated to avoid boredom; and everyone would receive a minimum wage and possibly a higher wage commensurate with their greater productivity or talent. The cost of renting apartments in the phalanstery would vary, depending on the size of the apartment and the luxuries it contained; and if tenants wished to occupy the more expensive apartments but could not afford the higher rent, they could make up the difference by working longer hours. While upward mobility through greater production was encouraged, no member of a Fourieristic community could be socially ostracized for a lack of industriousness, nor was any member expected to feel sexual frustration or deprivation: Even the least physically attractive were guaranteed a “sexual minimum” by the “erotic saints” who would make themselves available in private suites set aside for such purposes.
Monogamy among couples was discouraged by Fourier, who also felt that the nuclear family was a detriment to utopianism because it promoted possessiveness, nepotism, inward-thinking, and a narrow view of life that blurred the grander vision of mankind. Although Fourier was unable during his lifetime to raise sufficient capital to construct even a single phalanstery, certain of his ideas were considered meritorious and even practical by such influential Americans as Albert Brisbane, who had met Fourier in Paris and whose book The Social Destiny of Man brought Fourier to the attention of the editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, who in turn invited Brisbane to use the columns of the Tribune to popularize the theories and fantasies of Charles Fourier; and thus did Fourierism become a minor fad in America.
During the early 1840s, dozens of Fourier-inspired experiments were begun by various Utopians, escapists, and advocates of free love. Occupying large rambling houses on remote farms or in the outer thickets of towns and villages in the Northeast, the Midwest, and as far west as Texas, people sought to earn a collective livelihood through horticulture, small businesses, crafts, and light industries; but few of these associations survived for more than two years because they were undercapitalized, hastily organized, and soon splintered by disruptive factions.
Perhaps the best known of these settlements, though it was relatively discreet sexually, was the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, a six-year venture begun in 1841 ten miles from Boston in West Roxbury, and historically remembered mostly for having among its early members an aspiring young writer who had recently lost his job at the Boston Custom House—Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Earning his room and board by working on the farm, Hawthorne was at first enthralled by the rural experience and transcendental atmosphere, and even after spending a day in the field that was largely devoted to the spreading of manure he was able to write in a letter to a friend: “There is nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in this sort of toil as thou wouldst think. It defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul. This gold ore is a pure and wholesome substance; else our Mother Nature would not devour it so readily, and derive so much nourishment from it, and return such a rich abundance of good grain and roots in requital of it.”
But soon, within six months, Hawthorne had abandoned Brook Farm, convinced that the community was diverting him from his literary ambitions. “Romance and poetry,” he later wrote, “…need ruin to make them grow.” And in his novel of 1852, The Blithedale Romance, which was inspired by Brook Farm, he suggested that in communal living people tended to become too close, too aware of one another’s vibrations and personal piques: “…an unfriendly state of feeling could not occur between any two members, without the whole society being more or less commoted and made uncomfortable thereby…. If one of us happened to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the tingle was immediately felt on the same side of everybody’s head. Thus, even on the supposition that we were far less quarrelsome than the rest of the world, a great deal of time was necessarily wasted in rubbing our ears.”
Although John Humphrey Noyes was familiar with the Fourieristic movement, and had also visited during the 1830s free-love communes in such places as Brimfield, Massachusetts, he preferred to believe that he had little in common with the sexual radicals and social reformers of his day; he felt instead that he was divinely directed, was a spiritual messenger appointed to assist God on earth to establish a religion that would inspire people to love their neighbors truly and completely. Unlike the fanciful Fourier, or the itinerant intellectuals and writers who had visited Brook Farm—a group that included Thoreau and Emerson, Henry James and Margaret Fuller, Brisbane and Greeley—Noyes was not a theoretical Utopian or advocate of individual freedoms; he was a committed communist, an absolutist, a theocrat who wished to purge the sin of selfishness from the souls of men and to convert them to what he called “Bible Communism.” While he denounced egotism in other people, Noyes’s own ego was monumental; and yet he invariably justified his many preferences and pronouncements, including his interdiction of monogamous marriage, as being in concert with the teachings of the Bible.
“In the Kingdom of Heaven,” he wrote, “the institution of marriage which assigns the exclusive possession of one woman to one man does not exist [Matt. 22:23–30] for in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are as the Angels of God in Heaven…. The abolishment of sexual exclusiveness is involved in the love-relation required between all believers by the express injunction of Christ and the apostles and by the whole tenor of the New Testament…. The restoration of true relations between the sexes is a matter second in importance only to the reconciliation of man to God. Bible Communists are operating in this order. Their main work, since 1834, has been to develop the religion of the New Covenant and establish union with God….”
Noyes’s reference to 1834 was significant; it was in that year that he became convinced of his spiritual perfection, a state of sinlessness that had been evolving within him for nearly three years—since he had first received a God sign after attending a fiery and frenzied four-day revivalist rally held near his home in Putney, Vermont. At the time of the rally, in 1831, he was twenty years old, an ambitious and driven law student, though uncertain about his purpose; but after the rally he recalled: “Light gleamed upon my soul in a different way from what I had expected. It was dim and almost imperceptible at first but in the course of the day it attained meridian splendor. Ere the day was done I had concluded to devote myself to the service and ministry of God.”
He enrolled at the Andover Theological Seminary, but quit after one year because he believed that the seminarians lacked seriousness; he then registered at the Yale Divinity School, where he studied intensely, argued often with his peers and the faculty over biblical interpretation, and revealed a passion about religion that one contemporary likened to “an acute fever.” Soon some of his privately expressed theories at Yale were interpreted by other students as symptoms of a neurotic and heretical temperament-such as his belief that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was not a future event but had already happened during the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, at which time mankind had been saved from sin. Thus, in Noyes’s view, the Kingdom of God had at that time been established on earth and was still omnipresent in the atmosphere, and was viable in the souls of true believers; and, like the traveling evangelists that he had heard in New England advocating Perfectionism, Noyes was convinced that a person could, after a religious conversion, be spiritually perfect and answerable not to mundane moral laws, but to the mind of the Lord—and Noyes further believed that such a person was himself.
This he publicly acknowledged one day in February 1834 while preaching in the New Haven Free Church, causing a scandal and resulting almost immediately in the revocation of his license as a Congregationalist minister. Without a church at his disposal, Noyes wandered through New England and upstate New York preaching in the outdoors and recruiting followers. Hoping to attract distinguished colleagues and perhaps financial support to his cause, Noyes approached, without success, such men as the abolitionist and editor of the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, who had recently been attacked and almost lynched by a proslavery mob in Boston; and the controversial though well-endowed Presbyterian clergyman Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln would call “the greatest orator since Saint Paul” but who would be better remembered as the defendant in the celebrated adultery trial involving Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton.
