“To be a possibilitarian is to acknowledge that any of the thousand alternatives to capitalism is possible.” – Bread and Puppet Theater.  I wrote these entries when I first visited in the summer of 2019 with some updates from my trip in 2021. My wife and I planned a series of trips in 2019. In addition to the sites reviewed here, we also spent a few days in Montreal. I considered writing up something about the Quebecois nationalists like the Marxist-Leninist Front de libération du Québec who engaged in kidnappings of politicians and bombings to bring about an independent, socialist Quebec.[1] However, as a result of language and geographical confusion, that trip was hectic, so I chose not to write anything up about that leg of the journey. Besides, I do not really feel like I have much to say on the situation. Let Anglophone and Francophone Canadians fight it out. My anthropological observations as an outsider indicated that there is definitely a class divide between Francophones and Anglophones. The people that worked in the museums and galleries tended to speak both English and French fluently, while restaurant and grocery workers tended to speak exclusively French. I have heard that some bilingual Quebecois are offended by tourists not knowing French. In my experience, if one walked into a place and tried to speak broken French, most of the time people would just start speaking to you in English. The big trip my wife and I took that year was to what is known as the Northeast Kingdom or simply the “kingdom” of Vermont. I am not necessarily impressed with the monarchist sounding moniker offered to the region in 1949 by Republican Governor George Aiken. According to a leftist resident I talked to, it is apparently known as one of the more reactionary parts of the state. Still, there were many people we saw showing their support for Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” at the time running in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race. Even though Sanders is actually a proponent of what has historically been known as social democracy, or in America as liberalism or progressivism, his almost intentional misuse of the term socialism opens possibilities for a new kind of politics: one divorced from the Cold War discourse that blacklisted socialism and made it taboo. The possibilities offered by a Vermont “socialist” running for president seemed to have a good hold on the state of Vermont. Although we did see a Gadsden flag and a Confederate flag while we were there, we also met many far left radicals open to the thousands of possible alternatives to capitalism. Many Vermonters own guns, on both the right and the left. The state is known for its lax gun laws. It is a rural, forested state and could make a good strategic base from which to build a leftist stronghold in the northeastern United States if it was not becoming increasingly unaffordable to live there. On our way to Vermont we stopped in the Adirondack Mountains.The Adirondacks, along with the Alleghenies of Pennsylvania and the Green Mountains of Vermont, are collectively known as the Northeast Appalachians. W. E. B. Dubois wrote in his biography of John Brown: The vastest physical fact in the life of John Brown was the Alleghany [sic] Mountains – that beautiful mass of hill and crag which guards the sombre majesty of the Maine coast, crumples the rivers on the rocky soil of New England, and rolls and leaps down through busy Pennsylvania to the misty peaks of Carolina and the red foothills of Georgia. In the Alleghanies John Brown was all but born; their forests were his boyhood wonderland; in the villages he married his wives and begot his clan. On the sides of the Alleghanies he tended his sheep and dreamed his terrible dream. It was the mystic, awful voice of the mountains that lured him to liberty, death and martyrdom within their wildest fastness, and in the bosom he sleeps his last sleep.[2] It was in the Adirondacks that John Brown saw the possibility of an alternative to slavery. He sacrificed all to make it happen and even though his endeavor at Harper’s Ferry failed, it opened up another possibility for the end of slavery. It had a profound influence on the American Civil War. In 2021 we returned to these places with my daughter so that she could experience the ephemeral experience of American Socialism Travels. John Brown’s Farm – North Elba, NY photo by Wendy Jones This statue was the first thing we saw when we arrived at the end of John Brown Road. The statue is moving. It is so simple. John Brown talking to a young black boy as though he wasn an equal was a powerful act of defiance in the 1840s and 50s. John Brown was not just an abolitionist. Many of the abolitionists did not believe in equality, they simply believed slavery was distasteful. John Brown was not one of these bourgeois abolitionists. Although he owned businesses, most of them failed. He was impoverished and the little money he did have he put into the cause of ending the enslavement of people of African descent on the North American continent. When we returned to John Brown’s Farm in 2021, they had erected a temporary cemetery in remembrance of black lives unjustly taken at the hands of police and vigilantes. It stood as a somber yet militant answer to the uprisings of 2020. The names of Amaud Arbery, George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Amado Diallo, recent victims of state terrorism, sat mournfully alongside names like Rev. George Washington Lee and Elbert Williams, voting rights pioneers assassinated with police complicity. It was a sober reminder that John Brown’s approach, not the approach of the Democratic Party, the party of Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson and the Ku Klux Klan until 1964, is what is necessary to confront the racism and violence of the police. Photos by Wendy Jones One of the utopian endeavors John Brown took part in was the one that brought him to the Adirondacks. With the help of wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith he pioneered the black colony known as Timbuktu. It was Smith and Brown’s dream to help enfranchise free blacks. The law said that a black person could not vote in New York unless they owned 200 acres of land. It was Smith’s idea to buy land in the mountains to give to free blacks in hopes that they would be politically enfranchised and have means to farm and make money. Brown and his family moved to the Adirondacks to help with this utopian project. John Brown’s second wife and three of his youngest daughters lived at the farm in New York.  Mary Ann Brown with Annie (left) and Sarah (right) about 1851.[3] After the incident at Harper’s Ferry, Brown requested his body be brought back to North Elba to be buried. He is buried there along with a few of his followers. John Brown was so influential on the abolitionist cause in the North that a song called “John Brown’s Body” became an unofficial anthem of the Union. Like “Dixie,” “John Brown’s Body” was originally meant to be satirical, but people soon began to take it quite seriously.  Julia Ward Howe, poet, abolitionist, author of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” Julia Ward Howe, a poet and an abolitionist, wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” based on the tune of “John’s Brown’s Body.” A Union regiment was marching early in the morning near where Howe was staying. Early in the morning she could hear them singing “John Brown’s Body” and it inspired her to write the “Battle Hymn.” She wrote: I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, “I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.” So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.[4] It is said the Confederate troops would hear the Union Army marching to the “Battle Hymn” and know that they were really singing about John Brown. As much as the moderate Republicans like Lincoln wanted to distance unionism from abolitionism, the South believed the Republican Party was a black supremacist plot. Indeed many of the volunteers in the Union Army were militant abolitionists. Many of them were even black. And they did not just sing “Battle Hymn of the Republic'' to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” They often sang the original lyrics, proudly and audaciously celebrating the raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry that sparked what Karl Marx and the First International Workingmen’s Association called the American Anti-Slavery War.  Henry David Thoreau and John Brown Henry David Thoreau said in his paper A Plea for John Brown: If it does not lead to a “surprise” party, if he does not gain a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. “But he won’t gain anything by it.” Well, no, I don;t suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round; but he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul- and what a soul!- when you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than a quart of blood, but that is not the market heroes carry their blood to. Thoreau and Brown were both possibilitarians because they believed in doing the impossible to make possible alternatives to the legal slavery system, seen by many as here to stay. Clarina Howard Nichols Clarina Howard Nichols We also stayed in the Green Mountain area of Vermont that same year. We got a cabin in Townshend, Vermont with my in-laws. I would soon find that Townshend itself was home to some radical history. Clarina Howard Nichols was a feminist and suffragist activist born in 1810 in Townshend. Howard begged her father to give her “an education, not a dowry.” She went to school at the Select School for gifted learners in West Townshend. In 1830 she married a lawyer named Justin Carpenter and briefly moved to Western NY to start a school for girls. In 1839 Howard petitioned the Vermont legislature for a divorce from her husband who she said “treated her with cruelty, unkindness and intolerable severity.” This experience lead her to view marriage as an oppressive, exploitative institution not dissimilar to chattel slavery. After her divorce she moved back to Townshend and wrote feminist articles for the Windam County Democrat. She married George W. Nichols, publisher of the Democrat, in 1843. By the 1850s she had gained notoriety as a feminist and wearer of the Bloomer. The Bloomer, invented by Western NY born feminist Amelia Bloomer, was a loose fitting garment known as the uniform of the feminists. It was worn as a protest against the tight garments in fashion for women at the time. In 1852 she sent a petition signed by 250 in favor of extending the right to vote, which men enjoyed, to women. She became the first woman to address the Vermont legislature that same year. She later recalled, “I went to the capitol and presented the whole subject of woman’s legal wrongs, including the denial of her mother’s rights in the custody and control of her children, and the conduct of their education in the schools, as results of her disenfranchisement.” Unfortunately, much of the criticism of Ms. Howard Nichols was in reference to her dress, not the content of her speech. This was the home Clarina Howard grew up in with her parents in Townshend. Today it is a community center, restaurant, thrift store and post office for the town of Townshend.  John Humphrey Noyes John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Bible Communist Community of Christian Perfectionists at Oneida, NY, was born in Putney, VT. The Perfectionists in Putney briefly formed the Putney Community before moving most of their operations to Oneida. According to the Oneida Community Mansion House: Historic Structure Report: In 1839, John Humphrey organized a ‘Bible class” of friends and family. The group evolved to become the “Putney Community” in 1846. It was among this group of 30 trusted and loyal friends and family that Noyes formulated his plan for communal living. However, objections to the radical religious group grew in Putney within the next two years and by 1847, the Putney Perfectionists were forced to seek another location. John Humphrey Noyes explains the origins of the Putney Perfectionists in the book The Putney Community: Early in 1840 the Putney Perfectionists began holding meetings on Sunday in Noyes’s own house, which was now finished. By the end of 1840 meetings were also held Wednesday evenings at the East Part and Thursday evenings at the Noyes homestead. In 1841 a chapel was built, in which after August 1st daily sessions were held. The Perfectionist chapel no longer exists in Putney. My wife and I got lost looking for Putney, but we eventually stumbled across the birthplace of John Humphrey Noyes. Our pilgrimage had taken us through forests and onto literally impassable mountain roads. Finally we stumbled across Putney by accident, as though it was divine intervention after a two hour pilgrimage. Today the Noyes home hosts the offices of the Earth Bridge Community Land Trust. A community land trust is a modern version of a utopian socialist community. In a community land trust members own the land collectively and might share some common areas and buildings while maintaining private dwellings and farms. Images of Putney’s past courtesy of the Putney General Store. The Putney General Store was established in 1796. It is said to be the oldest general store that has been consistently a general store throughout its history. It burned down twice: in 2008 and 2009.In 2009 it appeared to be arson. The Putney community got together and raised enough money to remodel the store twice. Bread and Puppet Theater – Glover, Vermont The first encounter I had with the Bread and Puppet Theater was seeing them at protests in the early 2000s. When I would go to anti-war or what at that time was called “anti-globalization” (today known as anti-neoliberal or anti-free trade) protests they would be there with these huge, expressive, cartoonish but remarkably human puppets. When you saw the Bread and Puppets puppets you knew you had made it to the protest. Peter Schumann, born in Silesia in 1934, was a sculptor and dancer in Germany before moving to the United States in 1961. In 1963, he founded the Bread and Puppet Theater in New York City.[5] I contacted Joshua Krugman, Bread and Puppet’s media liaison. When I met him he described his role as, “just a puppeteer who answers emails.” When I initially talked to Jason I had a series of questions for him about utopianism versus scientism, the state character of Vermont and John Brown. He answered, “Unfortunately I’m too strapped for time to be able to answer in prose by email. My apologies for this, and thanks for understanding.” However, he invited my wife and I to dinner with the troupe before the performance and said we could do an interview there. When we arrived at the Bread and Puppet phalanx, we immediately noticed a group of racially diverse young people, looking to be in their 20s, crossing the road with parts of some kind of large puppet. First we explored the Cheap Art Bus. Then we explored the museum. It was a brilliant display of retired puppets densely populating a series of hallways and a gallery upstairs. The Bread and Puppet Museum is open all the time. The light switches are clearly marked so that anyone can come in, turn on a light and look around. Visitors are, of course, encouraged to turn the lights off upon exit. The bathrooms are traditional outhouses, utilizing sawdust. After exploring for a short time my wife and I made our way into the dinner area behind the main house. The dinner was, of course, a communal experience. Everyone got a plate and waited in line to be served. The meal was a slightly spicy chickpea curry, which was delicious, with homemade naan and salad with a creamy dressing and a vegan option. All the food was vegetarian. The curry was one of the members’ grandmother’s recipes. We sat on the lawn and ate as guests of the phalanx. We asked around and eventually Josh found us and we sat together on the lawn, talking and eating. I started by asking Josh about Vermont’s state character. He told me there were a lot of leftists, but mostly they were liberals. Josh remarked that the “kingdom” area is more conservative than other areas of Vermont. There are a lot of far-right “Libertarian” types and gun enthusiasts. However, he remarked that pretty much everyone is really friendly and accepting. LGBT folks are welcomed in almost all parts of Vermont. I asked Josh what utopia means to him. His answer, he explained, was influenced by messianic Judaism and a quote by 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, “Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.” He believed utopia was in the doing, the praxis of life and art. I asked him if spirituality and politics can or should be combined. He said, “I think it depends on your spirituality. Certainly they were for someone like John Brown.” Changing hats from individual thinker to collective representative, Josh said, “I think for us, Bread and Puppet, our political praxis is this, what we’re doing here. Feeding people and sharing art with them is our political praxis.” I was also lucky enough to have a chance to speak with Peter and Elka Shumann. I told Peter about my research into Fourierism and when I started talking about phalanxes he said, “Oh yes, the phalanstery.” I explained that I am from Rochester and our town has a rich history of political radicalism. I mentioned Emma Goldman had lived there for a short time. Elka was interested to hear that. Then she told me Emma was going to be in the performance tonight.  Photo by Wendy Jones I asked Elka what made her interested in left wing politics. She said, “Oh, my grandfather probably.” Her grandfather was Scott Nearing, an American radical economist. She told me he was fired from the reactionary Wharton School of Finance for opposing child labor in the mines in Pennsylvania.  Socialist economist and simple living advocate Scott Nearing Elka grew up in the Soviet Union. Her family moved in the New York City in 1941 to escape a Nazi invasion and occupation of parts of the USSR. She met Peter in Munich in 1958.[6] In the 1970s Bread and Puppet Theater had a residency at Goddard College, but Elka said they eventually told them their residency was up. She said in the 70s Goddard College was very radical and had many radical students and faculty, but later on they became more reactionary.  The famous Uncle Fatso Ultimately I wonder how much art and lifestyle can be considered political praxis. I wonder if, in some ways, supporting Bernie Sanders, far from a revolutionary act, is more praxis than putting on plays in the woods. Ultimately political praxis means trying to take power. John Brown’s political praxis was certainly so effective that it actually caused a war. I think the Bread and Puppet phalanx might prefer to march away from war altogether. Murray Bookchin’s polemic against Hakim Bey and others entitled “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm” says: Essentially, however, anarchism as a whole advanced what Isaiah Berlin has called ‘negative freedom,’ that is to say, a formal ‘freedom from,’ rather than a substantive ‘freedom to.’ Indeed, anarchism often celebrated its commitment to negative freedom as evidence of its own pluralism, ideological tolerance, or creativity — or even, as more than one recent postmodernist celebrant has argued, its incoherence. I think the Bread and Puppet phalanx attempts to bridge this chasm, but ultimately, as Abraham Lincoln said, a house divided against itself cannot stand. It either becomes one thing or the other. In this case I fear Bread and Puppet leans more toward lifestyle anarchism. Their art and lifestyle embody the politics they believe in, but, as Josh said, they are not prefigurative. They do not believe they have a model that the world should imitate. They do what they do for their own satisfaction in feeling righteous. The theme of the show we saw was Diagonalism. I still do not know exactly what Diagonalism is, but my understanding is that it is an attempt to tip the world to one side or the other. I don’t want to tip the scales. I want to push them to one side completely. Possibilitarianism, on the other hand, the belief that any of the thousands of alternatives to capitalism are possible, that I am behind wholeheartedly.  In 2021 we went to Bread and Puppet’s “Our Domestic Resurrection Circus.” It was a rainy day and the event was outside. We brought our faithful dog, Oliver, along. Oliver hates to be wet, but he was a trooper. Luckily, we took him to the Dog Chapel at Dog Mountain in Saint Johnsbury, VT earlier in the day where he got to meet some real dogs and a few fake ones.  Artist Stephen Huneck conceived of the Dog Chapel and Dog Mountain after a near death experience in 1997. Its motto is “WELCOME ALL CREEDS, ALL BREEDS, NO DOGMAS ALLOWED!” Huneck wrote: ...the near-death experience, combined with what my wife taught me about love, and the appreciation I felt toward the most basic things we all take for granted had a profound effect on me. As an artist, I share the feelings I have with others through my art. One day, not long after I was back home with my wife and three dogs, a wild idea just popped into my mind (a frequent thing, but after several weeks had gone by, this one was still there).... Coming down from the high of Dog Mountain, faithful Oliver dutifully endured with us through the rain as we viewed a few side shows, one in which they burned two white flags that read “US” and “Canada.” There were a few gasps. The piece decried the violence recently literally unearthed outside several Canadian Catholic boarding schools meant to inflict cultural genocide on the First Nations peoples, where mass graves of children, abducted from their homes, were left unmarked for years. I wondered how many in the audience were actually sympathetic to revolutionary leftism. I myself wore a Fidel Castro t-shirt, but I wondered if any were offended by my brandishing of the image of a so-called “dictator.” My daughter assured me that most anarchists would probably be least offended by Fidel out of all the so-called “communist dictators.” However, I recalled that when we went to Bread and Puppet in 2019, there was a middle aged woman who was apparently a Trump supporter that had come with some friends and stormed out when the political commentary started. As much as Bread and Puppet has become somewhat of a proud Vermont tradition in the Northern Kingdom, Schumann and his phalanx have never toned down their message. “Our Domestic Resurrection Circus” at times hilarious, at times awe inspiring, contained segments defending Cuba and Palestine and denouncing capitalism, commercialism and greed. Although I felt in 2019 that Bread and Puppet was practicing lifestyle anarchism, I now understand the purpose of their art. Peter Schumann wrote in the cheap art manifesto: PEOPLE have been THINKING for too long that ART is a PRIVILEGE of the MUSEUMS and the RICH. ART is not BUSINESS! ART IS FOOD! YOU can't EAT it but it FEEDS you. ART has to be CHEAP and available to EVERYBODY... ART wakes up sleepers. ART FIGHTS AGAINST WAR and STUPIDITY! ART SINGS HALLELUJA! Schumann and his phalanx bring cheap art and simple “golden rule” morality to the people through their performances. Even the owner of the mountain cabin we stayed in, who had right wing decals on their truck, had inside the cabin a Bread and Puppet flag that just said “Yes” with an image of a rose. The Northern Kingdom knows Bread and Puppet is a unique draw to the area. Schumann and his phalanx know that if you build it, they will come and be fed on radical, political art, hopefully thinking about the world a little bit differently on the way home.  Photo by Wendy Jones Works Cited [1] Lorne Weston, "THE FLQ: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION," Department of Political Science, McGill University, 1989: 184. [2] W. E. Burghardt, Dubois, John Brown, (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs and Co., 1909), 48. [3] Source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/wives-and-children-of-john-brown.htm [4] Howe, Julia Ward. Reminiscences: 1819–1899.Houghton, Mifflin: New York, 1899, 275. [5] “About B & P’s 50 Year History.” Bread and Puppet Theater. Accessed July 08, 2019. https://breadandpuppet.org/about-b-ps-50-year-history. [6] “Oral History Interview with Elka Schumann.” Digital Vermont: A Project of the Vermont Historical Society. Accessed July 08, 2019. http://digitalvermont.org/vt70s/AudioFile1970s-37. [7] “Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm.” The Anarchist Library. Accessed July 08, 2019. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-social-anarchism-or-lifestyle-anarchism-an-unbridgeable-chasm. [8] Stephen Huneck, “Huneck Vision Statement.” Huneck Vision Statement | Dog Mountain, VT - Stephen Huneck Accessed July 26, 2021, https://www.dogmt.com/Huneck-Vision-Statement.html. AuthorMitchell K. Jones is a historian and activist from Rochester, NY. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history from the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He has written on utopian socialism in the antebellum United States. His research interests include early America, communal societies, antebellum reform movements, religious sects, working class institutions, labor history, abolitionism and the American Civil War. His master’s thesis, entitled “Hunting for Harmony: The Skaneateles Community and Communitism in Upstate New York: 1825-1853” examines the radical abolitionist John Anderson Collins and his utopian project in Upstate New York. Jones is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Archives July 2021
2 Comments
6/10/2021 American Socialism Travels: Western New York’s Spiritual Ultraists. By: Mitchell JonesRead Now Andrew Jackson Davis circa 1847 John Humphrey Noyes argued the utopian socialist movement in America was a continuation of the Second Great Awakening and the teachings of Methodist minister Charles Finney.[1] While many of the socialists of the Owenite and Fourierist periods were atheists or freethinkers, the earlier and more institutional communist societies were religious. Christian groups like the Shakers, the Zoarites and the Amanas all lived communally in America before secular socialist Robert Owen first visited in 1824. Noyes believed socialism should not be separate from religion.[2] The revivalist religious tradition inspired individuals to reform their souls. For Noyes, only religion provided sufficient “afflatus” or collective motivation to carry out the work that socialism required. He wrote: And these movements - Revivalism and Socialism - opposed to each other as they may seem, and as they have been in the creeds of their partizans [sic], are closely related in their essential nature and objects, and manifestly belong together in the scheme of Providence, as they do in the history of this nation. They are to each other as inner to outer—as soul to body—as life to its surroundings. The Revivalists had for their great idea the regeneration of the soul. The great idea of the Socialists was the regeneration of society, which is the soul's environment. These ideas belong together, and are the complements of each other. Neither can be successfully embodied by men whose minds are not wide enough to accept them both.[3] He argued that these two elements, spiritual enlightenment and worldly communism, were present in the early Christian church, concluding: Doubtless the Revivalists and Socialists despise each other, and perhaps both will despise us for imagining that they can be reconciled. But we will say what we believe; and that is, that they have both failed in their attempts to bring heaven on earth, because they despised each other, and would not put their two great ideas together. The Revivalists failed for want of regeneration of society, and the Socialists failed for want of regeneration of the heart.[4] Religiosity was a common response to the economic changes taking place in Upstate New York in the 1820s. Rochester, New York was an epicenter of economic growth driven by the Erie Canal. According to historian Carol Sheriff, “From a middle-class perspective, the Canal had become a haven for vice and immorality; the towpaths attracted workers who drank, swore, whored, and gambled…. These canallers provided a daily reminder of what fluid market relations - and progress - could bring.”[5] By the 1830s, many Rochesterians felt the market revolution encouraged an increasingly sinful lifestyle. The drinking, violence, racism and misogyny characteristic of canal worker culture in Western New York had devastating effects on the workers’ health, security, safety and prospects for social mobility. Historian Peter Way argues that while working class communities offered a measure of solidarity and autonomy to canal workers that the market did not offer in the 1820s, they just as often encouraged anti-social behavior that divided the working class and kept them in a subjugated position.[6] Faced with working class culture’s failure to uplift their economic station, conscientious laborers turned to the religious radicals of the business class who had both the motivation to seek a new economic system and the economic power to put such a new system into place.[7] Western New York became a fertile atmosphere for experimental views of society. Mobile tent revivals had already swept through the region as part of the first Great Awakening in the 1730s and 40s. By the 1820s, the Western frontier near Rochester, New York was the epicenter of the Second Great Awakening.[8] Itinerant Methodist minister Charles Finney, who came to Rochester in 1830 on a mission to save Rochesterian souls, was the standard-bearer for the Second Great Awakening. Although his doctrine spoke to a broad range of trends in society to which people could relate, initially Finney’s appeal was not necessarily theology. Finney refused a theological scholarship at Princeton in 1870 because he believed traditional clerical training was out of touch with the common people. He argued it rendered the preacher ineffective.[9] Finney’s style was unorthodox. He was direct, at times even confrontational. He addressed the audience as “you” rather than a more general pronoun. He used simple, vernacular language and made frequent use of repetition.[10] His sermons were never written down. He improvised based on the reactions of his audience.[11] All these methods elicited an enthusiastic, emotional response from those who came to listen. At the time these methods were known as “ultraism.” To 19th century onlookers, ultraism was a system of actions, mannerisms and attitudes that fostered new and controversial religious doctrines. Ultraism was exemplified in the “New Measures” Finney employed at his services.[12] So influential was Finney’s ultraism that it soon became the standard for new preachers.[13] Essential to the new measures were new approaches to prayer. Prayer was social while at the same time personal. Men and women prayed in groups together. It was an offense against God to communicate with Him in generalities. Each parishioner must make a “prayer of faith,” a specific request inspired by a desire to see the Lord glorified.[14] Despite Finney’s disdain for stuffy theology, perfectionism and millenarianism were key theological doctrines of the Second Great Awakening that directly influenced the emergence of utopian socialism. Christian perfectionism was the idea that humankind could achieve perfection on Earth. Millenarianism was the belief that Jesus Christ would return to Earth for a second time and he would rule for a thousand years. Perfectionist millenarians argued true servants of God must create a paradise on Earth to pave the way for the thousand-year reign of Jesus the Lord. Historian Paul Johnson writes: The millennium would be accomplished when sober, godly men - men whose every step was guided by a living faith in Jesus - exercised power in this world. Clearly, the revival of 1831 was a turning point in the long struggle to establish that state of affairs. American Protestants knew that, and John Humphrey Noyes later recalled that, ‘In 1831 the whole orthodox church was in a state of ebullition in regard to the Millennium.’[15] Radical ministers John Humphrey Noyes and James Boyle were part of the Second Great Awakening movement. Boyle joined the socialist Northampton Association alongside self-freed abolitionist Sojourner Truth. The Northampton Association later became a wing of the New Church, an emergent religious movement based on the teachings of 18th century Swedish Lutheran mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.[16] Noyes, originally a Congregationalist, on the other hand, formed the Oneida Community of Bible Communists in Oneida, NY in that revolutionary year, 1848.[17] Boyle was one of the first to join Noyes’ bible communist community. These examples make it clear that the attempt to establish a Heaven on Earth led some to believe that a radical restructuring of society was necessary and become leaders in the movement. According to Brisbane, socialism took hold in Western New York because it was the fulfillment of the heaven on earth perfectionist preachers like Finney promised. He wrote: It will no doubt be gratifying to those who take an interest in the great idea of a Social Reform, to learn that it is spreading very generally through the State of New York…. The conviction that Association will realize Christianity practically upon earth, which never can be done in the present system of society, with its injustice, frauds, distrust, and the conflict and opposition of all interests, is taking hold of many minds and attracting them strongly to it.[18] Brisbane saw the utility in appealing to the religious sentiments of Western New York’s residents. He discovered Charles Fourier’s ideas in 1830, the year before Finney’s big revival.[19] He adapted Fourier’s theories to the sensibilities of an American audience, focusing mainly on his economic program and avoiding his libertine sexual ideas. He spoke to Americans about social problems that affected them rather than risk upsetting those with conservative views toward religion and marriage. Although most Fourierists upheld the truth of the teachings of Jesus Christ, they distrusted organized religion. The Fourierist Phalanx newspaper argued Christian preachers tried to uphold a theoretical virtue while ignoring the “depraving influences” that induced individuals to turn away from the Christian path. The author explained, “The Truth of Christianity has not yet acted upon false human societies and transformed them - establishing the reign of justice and peace and harmony in the place of the reign of discord and evil.”[20] The Fourierists argued that they were the ones who would accomplish the social mission of Jesus Christ: “the social redemption and elevation of mankind on earth.”[21] Fourier taught that all individuals have “passional attraction” and that philanthropically minded people must shape society to be in harmony with such attractions.[22] He believed society must nurture these innate passions in order to make labor attractive. Attractive labor would smooth over the contradictions in society and achieve universal harmony. Passional attraction was akin to God’s holy spirit. If humanity was to be in harmony with God’s plan they had to base society around passional law. Albert Brisbane believed that once society reached this harmonic stage the divinity of everyday life would replace the old religions.[23] Massachusetts radicals associated with the transcendentalist utopian community at Brook Farm went as far as to create their own church devoted to Fourier’s teachings called the Religious Union of Associationists in 1847. It became known as the Church of Humanity under the leadership of Unitarian minister William Henry Channing. The group taught a syncretic blend of biblical Christianity and Fourierist philosophy. They even put on elaborate rituals venerating both Jesus Christ and Charles Fourier as saints.[24] However, by 1847, Channing and many other religious Brook Farmers largely converted to a liberal reading of Swedenborgianism. Perhaps coincidentally, spiritualist medium Andrew Jackson Davis, the so-called “Pougkipsee Seer,” reported he had met Emmanuel Swedenborg’s ghost in 1844. The ghost told him to reach out to Brook Farm in order to help with their Christian efforts.[25] By 1847, Davis was one of the key spiritual leaders at Brook Farm. A writer for the Perfectionist Oneida Circular explained, “Swedenborgianism went deeper into the hearts of the people than the Socialism that introduced it, because it was a religion. The Bible and revivals had made men hungry for something more than social reconstruction. Swedenborg's offer of a new heaven as well as a new earth, met the demand magnificently.”[26]  Emanuel Swedenborg, portrait by Carl Frederik von Breda The Swedenborgians had been welcoming to utopians since Robert Owen convinced the Swedenborgians of Cincinnati, Ohio to form the Yellow Springs Community with him in 1824.[27] Swedenborgians participated in other Owenite communities as well. A New Church journalist reported that Swedenborgians were involved in nearly every Fourierist phalanx.[28] John Humphrey Noyes reported, “[I]t is not too much to say that their Fourierism, if it had lived, would have had Swedenborgianism for its state-religion.”[29] Homeopathic practitioner Charles Julius Hempel wrote of Fourier and Swedenborg in 1848, “The doctrines of these two great men cannot remain separate. Their union constitutes the union of Science and Religion.”[30] However, in their treatises to the public, the Fourierists expressed no interest in an official church. They presented their creed as both democratically eccumenical and the true fulfillment of Christ’s prophecies. Bribane promised that under a harmonian order: [T]he most perfect Freedom of Opinion will exist, and a true sentiment of Tolerance be inculcated. Every individual will enjoy his religious opinions precisely as he wishes and without restriction. The Association will build a Church, and if there are persons who entertain particular religious views, the Association will furnish them halls, where they can render thanks to the Creator of the Universe as they feel and judge proper.[31] The Fourierist Clarkson Phalanx was particularly successful in applying Brisbane’s principles of ecumenical association. Members were of a range of different religions. A member of each religion was on the gospel committee, which oversaw religious services.[32] Clarkson phalangist John Greig explained: As for religion, we had seventy-four praying Christians, including all the sects in America, excepting Millerites and Mormons. We had one Catholic family (Dr. [Edwin Arthur] Thellers), one Presbyterian clergyman, and one Universalist. One of our first trustees was a Quaker, one Atheist, several Deists, and in short a general assortment ; but of Nothingarians, none ; for being the first time in our lives, we spoke out, one and all and found that everybody did believe something.[33] Greig made sure to mention that everyone, regardless of faith, loved the atheist. The Clarkson Phalanx’s mixing of religions was remarkable. Other communities that had tried ecumenical association, including earlier Owenist communities and even Clarkson’s rival Sodus Bay Phalanx, suffered contention and strife over religious differences. The ecumenical harmony at the Clarkson Phalanx interested John Humphrey Noyes. He did not believe a community could stay together without a common religion. The Clarkson Phalanx seems to have partially diminished Noyes’ disbelief. He mused: One feature of Mr. Greig's entertaining sketch deserves notice in passing, viz., his cheerful boast of the multiplicity of religions in the Clarkson Association, and the wonderful harmony that prevailed among them. The meaning of the boast undoubtedly is, that religious belief was so completely a secondary and insignificant matter, that it did not prevent peaceful family relations, even between the atheists and the orthodox.[34] He made a point of mentioning that religious disagreement was one of the main flaws that lead to the downfall of the Sodus Bay Phalanx in an attempt to debunk Grieg's boasts. However, he was baffled by the reports from his own disciple regarding the religious situation at Clarkson. The Fourierists’ fascination with Swedenborg led to a general embrace of spiritualism on the American left. British author Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of Swedenborg: In spite of all his theological symbolism, his name must live eternally as the first of all modern men who has given a description of the process of death, and of the world beyond, which is not founded upon the vague ecstatic and impossible visions of the old Churches, but which actually corresponds with the descriptions which we ourselves obtain from those who endeavour to convey back to us some clear idea of their new existence.[35] Conan Doyle disagreed with some of Swedenborg’s assumptions. However, he acknowledged his laying the foundation for spiritualism. According to Conan Doyle, the Shakers were the link between Swedenborgianism, socialism and spiritualism. Conan Doyle described the Shakers’ practice of receiving visionary gifts. Native American spirits were frequent spiritual visitors to the Shakers. A participant at one of these events explained, “One or two elders might be in the room below, and there would be a knock at the door and the Indians would ask whether they might come in. Permission being given, a whole tribe of Indian spirits would troop into the house, and in a few minutes you would hear ‘Whoop !’ here and ‘Whoop !’ there all over the house.”[36] Lewis Henry Morgan also made frequent appearances in Shaker gift trances.[37] Conan Doyle concluded, “This episode of the Shaker manifestations is a very distinct link between the Swedenborg pioneer work and the period of Davis and the Fox sisters.”[38] Scottish clergyman and founder of the Catholic Apostolic Church, Edward Irving, himself known for visions and speaking in tongues, became another link between socialism and spiritualism. Irving became interested in Robert Owen’s socialist communities in the 1820s. Conan Doyle wrote, “Irving and the stalwarts who were loyal to him wandered forth in search of new premises, and found them in the hall used by Robert Owen, the Socialist, philanthropist, and free-thinker, who was destined twenty years later to be one of the pioneer converts to Spiritualism.”[39] By 1854, formerly atheist Owen even converted to spiritualism after holding sessions with American medium Maria B. Hayden. Owen claimed to have met with the ghosts of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in order to enlist their help to supplant “the present, false, disunited and miserable state of human existence, for a true, united and happy state... to prepare the world for universal peace, and to infuse into all the spirit of charity, forbearance and love.”[40] Owen believed Spiritualism held to power to unlock human potential so people would naturally begin to establish the kind of socialist utopia he had envisioned. Owen’s son Robert Dale, raised atheist, also converted to spiritualism around the same time. He wrote: [O]n the 4th March, 1856… I witnessed for the first time, with mingled feelings of surprise and incredulity, certain physical movements apparently without material agency. Three weeks later, during an evening at the Russian Minister’s, an incident occurred, as we say, fortuitously, which, after the strictest scrutiny, I found myself unable to explain without referring it to some intelligent agency foreign to the spectators present - not one of whom, it may be added, knew or had practiced anything connected with what is called Spiritualism or mediumship. From that day, I determined to test the matter thoroughly.[41] Robert Dale Owen wrote two books on spiritualism: Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World in 1859 and The Debatable Land Between this World and the Next in 1872. The Owens had scientific, skeptical ways of seeing the world. Their inquiries into spiritualism apparently satisfied their conditions for revision of previous views based on new evidence. While spiritualism was coming into vogue in the 1850s, another religion with origins in Western New York was also growing. The angel Moroni visited the prophet Joseph Smith in Palmyra, NY in 1823. The introduction to the Book of Mormon states, “On September 21, 1823, the same Moroni, then a glorified, resurrected being, appeared to the Prophet Joseph Smith and instructed him relative to the ancient record and its destined translation into the English language.”[42] Throughout that decade, Smith claimed to have frequent visitation with angels who inspired him to pen the Book of Mormon. Between 1830 and 1844, angry mobs ran Smith’s followers out of Palmyra, NY, Kirtland, OH, Jackson County, MO and finally Nauvoo, Iowa where a mob killed Smith.[43] They were hated for their radical theology and polygamist marriage relations. Today, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has their headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. However, they still own the historic site in Palmyra where Joseph Smith first received the revelations that led to the creation of the church. The Second Great Awakening was a key subjective condition that allowed Western New York to transform from the burnt over district of revivalism to the volcanic district of utopian socialism. After the 1840s, Western New Yorkers once again looked to religion to do what secular institutions had thus far been unable to do: create a better world. Fox Sisters Historical Site and Spiritualist Utopia Depiction of Fox house According to legend, on March 31st, 1848 two sisters, Kate and Margaretta Fox, decided to respond to the mysterious rapping that had kept the family awake at night. The rappings were thought to be construction going on down the road, but fifteen year old Margaretta and eleven year old Kate decided to try and communicate with them. They said, “Do as I do,” and clapped three times. The rappings rapped three times. The event is said to be the birth of the Modern Spiritualist movement.[44]  The Fox sisters: Margaretta, Kate and Leah. Title: “Mrs. Fish and the Misses Fox: The Original Mediums of the Mysterious Noises at Rochester Western, N.Y.” Lithograph after a daguerreotype by Appleby, Rochester, NY Kate and Margaretta later claimed they were communicating with a peddler named Charles B. Rosna who told them he had been murdered in the home. According to the sisters, Rosna told them he had been murdered by the man who owned the home previous to the Foxes for being overly friendly with his wife.  Foundation of the Hydesville Fox home. The building was moved to Lilydale in 1916. News of the sisters’ abilities reached Amy and Isaac Post, radical Hicksite Quakers in Rochester, NY who called on the sisters to move to the city, promising to support their careers as itinerant mediums. Kate and Margaretta moved in with their sister Leah in Rochester who soon became their business manager. They first demonstrated the rappings in Rochester’s Corinthian Hall on November 14th, 1849. They soon caught the attention of radical newspaper magnate and congressman Horace Greeley, himself interested in a variety of religious and reform movements from Fourierism to Universalism. Greeley introduced the sisters to the New York socialite scene where they developed a taste for wine and brandy. The sisters eventually would struggle with alcoholism. From there the spiritualist movement grew and became a national sensation. The Fox sisters and their imitators held seances in most major cities. In 1888 the sisters rejected spiritualism. Margaretta wrote in an 1888 letter to Greeley’s newspaper the New York Tribune: That I have been chiefly instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too-confiding public, most of you doubtless know. The greatest sorrow in my life has been that this is true, and though it has come late in my day, I am now prepared to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God! . . I am here tonight as one of the founders of Spiritualism to denounce it as an absolute falsehood from beginning to end, as the flimsiest of superstitions, the most wicked blasphemy known to the world.[45] Magician Harry Houdini took an interest in the Fox sisters’ skills. Margaretta told him, “When we went to bed at night we used to tie an apple to a string and move the string up and down, causing the apple to bump on the floor, or we would drop the apple on the floor, making a strange noise every time it would rebound. Mother listened to this for a time. She would not understand it and did not suspect us as being capable of a trick because we were so young.” As for the peddler who accused the home owner of his murder Margaretta told Houdini: They [the neighbors] were convinced that some one had been murdered in the house. They asked the spirits through us about it and we would rap one for the spirit answer ‘yes,’ not three as we did afterwards. The murder they concluded must have been committed in the house. They went over the whole surrounding country trying to get the names of people who had formerly lived in the house. Finally they found a man by the name of Bell, and they said that this poor innocent man had committed a murder in the house and that the noises had come from the spirit of the murdered person. Poor Bell was shunned and looked upon by the whole community as a murderer.[46] Kate too wrote in the New York Herald, “I regard Spiritualism as one of the greatest curses that the world has ever known.”[47] I asked Tracy, a member of the Spiritualist Church and caretaker of the Hydesville property, why she believed Margaretta would recant. She explained that interest in spiritualism had waned by the 1880s and Margaretta found it difficult to maintain her financial well being along with her alcohol habit. Houdini promised her a great deal of money to help him with his book A Magician Among the Spirits. Tracy argued she was clearly materially motivated to collaborate with Houdini. In 1904, after both of the sisters had passed away, the Fox’s Hydesville home was moved to the Spiritualist community at Lily Dale, New York. The peddler’s bones were indeed found in a part of the wall that looked like it had been built for the purpose of hiding a body. Despite Margaretta’s recantation, at least one of the sisters’ claims was indeed vindicated.[48]  Part of the foundation where a false wall was built to hide the bones of the peddler who was killed in the Hydesville home. An excavation of the basement was done after the March 31st, 1848 event, but nothing was found. The bones were discovered in 1904 after the cottage was moved to Lily Dale, NY. In 1847, a group of spiritualists led by John Wattles attempted to restart the utopian socialist community of Utopia, Ohio. Utopia was started as a Fourierist Phalanx in 1844. The Fourierist community only lasted a few years. It was then reorganized by Robert Owen’s former comrade, Josiah Warren, the first American anarchist.[49] The anarchist project at Utopia, OH also failed, offering Wattles and his followers an opportunity to build a Lily Dale-like community in Ohio. Wattles and his wife, former Quaker Esther Whinery, brought about one hundred followers with them to Utopia.[50] In December of 1847, the Ohio River flooded. Several families sought refuge in the communal building but the building’s structural integrity did not hold under the force of the water. Seventeen out of the thirty-two individuals that took refuge in the house died, including several entire families. According to legend the Spiritualists prayed and prayed for the floods to recede as they met their doom.[51] The remaining spiritualists refused to leave. However, the river did not relent. According to Esther Wattles, “a whirlwind that carried the water from the river, 40 feet high” decimated what remained of the community. One historian wrote in 1880, “This disaster, occurring at night and during a terrible storm, struck terror into the hearts of the people. The history of the community from its inception to its calamitous close is the most tragic event that has ever occurred in the country.”[52] John and Esther Wattles had to concede to the river, but they still did not give up. They continued to scout locations for a spiritualist community in the West.[53]  This underground church built by Wattles and the Spiritualists is now all that remains of Utopia, OH. It is today known as an extreme tourism site and ghost town. Image source: http://ohiokayak.blogspot.com/2012/11/is-it-really-utopia-along-ohio-river.html  Spiritualist John Wattles  Today Modern Spiritualism continues to attract followers. The Plymouth Spiritualist Church in Rochester, NY is still active and has regular services. Hydesville no longer exists. It is today near the town of Newark, NY. Lily Dale Assembly  In Robert Owen’s spiritualist treatise The future of the Human race; or great glorious and future revolution to be effected through the agency of departed spirits of good and superior men and women Owen listed newly discovered facts that he believed would alter the course of human history for the better: That the disclosure to men of the means of direct immediate communication with spirits of departed good and superior men, has opened the means to society by which the invisible material conditions in which to place all born of man may be greatly improved Lily Dale was built as a beacon for spiritual energy that would collect and flow from Lake Cassadaga out to the world. Robert Owen believed this mission was in line with his socialist ideas. The first rumblings of Mesmerism came the same year as the explosion of Fourierism in Western New York. In 1844, a man known only as Doctor Moran came from Vermont to Laona, New York to demonstrate the practice of Mesmerism.[55] Mesmerism, discovered by 17th century doctor Franz Anton Mesmer, was the belief in a transference of energy, or animal magnetism, between all living things.[56] Mesmerists believed they could manipulate the animal magnetic field to move objects, heal and have other effects on humans, animals and plants.  William Johnson, the son of Laona’s Methodist minister, attended Dr. Moran’s demonstration and learned enough to heal Jeremiah Carter, who was not at the demonstration, of his consumption. Carter learned from Johnson how to enter a trace through a mesmeric state. Others throughout the town discovered they had trance inducing powers. The town welcomed outsiders to weekly spirit communication demonstrations. They formed the Religious Society of Freethinkers, a spiritualist society, in 1855.[57] In 1879, spiritualists formed the Cassadaga Lake Free Association, a camp meeting to gather spiritualists from around the world for the practice and demonstration of their craft.[58] The residents had annual camp meetings and built permanent dwellings in the area. In 1880 they dedicated their association to “free speech, free thought and free investigation.”[59] The community continued to grow through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They changed their name to The City of Light in 1903 and then finally to Lily Dale Assembly in 1906.[60] I went with my family to Lily Dale in May of 2021. It was near my daughter’s birthday, so we shelled out the $100 to get her a reading with one of the mediums there. I, as her parent, was allowed to sit in on the session. There were hits and misses. At times it seemed as though she really was communicating with our relatives that have passed. At other times it seemed like she was stretching to try and make what she said fit our situation. Psychics, mediums, tarot readers are all versions of psychotherapists. Psychologist Carl Jung was not afraid to acknowledge this fact. Jung was influenced by spiritualism in his early days. Author F. X. Charet argues in the book Spiritualism and the Foundations of C.G. Jung's Psychology that elements of Jung’s psychological theories such as the concept of psychic energy, were influenced by his early preoccupation with spiritualism. Even if one does not believe in the supernatural, there is still a use of spirit communicators. They can foster a connection to the past, a sense of community, a respect for the law of love and a new perspective on current situations. Although we had already been to Hydesville and saw the foundation, we were not able to see the Fox family’s actual cottage where the famous “Rochester rappings” took place. In 1915, spiritualist devotee B. F. Bartlett purchased the Fox family’s cottage in Hydesville. However, he could not purchase the land. Spiritualists took the cottage apart and transported it in parts on the Erie Canal. Lily Dale dedicated it as a shrine to spiritualism in 1916. In 1955, it burned down. According to spiritualist Reverend Arthur Myers: Four o’clock in the morning, September 21, 1955, I sit here in my home staring dejectedly into emptiness. I have just witnessed the end of a cottage. An era is ended, an historical relic important to the whole world has been consumed by outlaw yellow flames. An international shrine leveled in a few short minutes to the category of memory. The Fox Cottage is no more. The Forest Temple at the Dale began as little more than a clearing and some benches in the woods in 1892. In 1914, spiritualist Benjamin Bartlett had a chapel built. He dedicated the structure to his mother. Today spiritualists reveal spiritual messages every day at 4:00pm at the Forest Temple during the regular camp season, which goes from the last week in June until the end of August.  Spiritualist Marion Skidmore began collecting books camp goers brought to Lily Dale in the 1880s. She began the library at Lily Dale in 1886. Today the library houses a collection of around 1,300 spiritualist books.[62] Unfortunately, the library was closed on the day we went. The Inspiration Stump The Lily Dale pet cemetery Chief Os-Ke-Non-Ton of the Mohawk nation was one of Lily Dale’s most famous residents. He became famous as a singer and performed concerts around the world in the 1910s and 20s. During the 1930s and 40s, Os-Ke-Non-Ton held healing circles in a wigwam at Lily Dale. On our way through Lily Dale, we got gas in sovereign Seneca nation territory. The Senecas and the Mohaws were both members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.  Andrew Jackson Davis circa 1847 Andrew Jackson Davis became one of the most well known itinerant spiritualists. When he was a boy, Davis claimed to have heard voices in the fields. When his mother died, Davis had a vision of her in heaven.[63] On March 6, 1844, Davis claimed to have entered a trance and been transported from Poughkeepsie to the Catskill Mountains. During this incident, the spirit of Emmanuel Swedenborg guided him back to civilization.[64] Swedenborg told Davis to meet with the Fourierists of Massachussetts. Davis became a socialist. Later on, socialist Albert Brisbane was often one of Jackson’s witnesses at his trance demonstrations.[65] Davis spent that last third of the book Principles of Nature, which he claimed to have written in a trance state, advocating a form of socialism similar to Fourier’s formula. Davis recommended the establishment of cooperative communities and collectivized economic planning: Then they must inquire into the various modes and plans of organizing and combining labor; how much labor it is proper to be- stow upon any given object ; at what time it should be bestowed, and how many can labor profitably to accelerate its accomplishment. Knowing these things, and adopting the proper plans of proceeding, they should call to their assistance as many laborers as can properly and profitably be employed. Davis believed this Fourerist-like system would bring the greatest fulfillment to mankind: Their interests will consist, not in the accumulation of needless wealth, but in happiness — which each person will enjoy, from being so situated as to render others happy. Not for the purpose of speculating upon community will the association labor, but to ameliorate the condition of the mechanic and the various professions, by supplying their wants abundantly, and at a price which falls within their resources.[67] Although he did not call it such by name, he praised Fourierism under the name “Agricultural Association:” In this manner can labor be condensed, made attractive, profitable, and elevating. And this is the rudimental step toward establishing among the tillers of the land a reciprocal movement, and a privilege of assisting themselves and community to a more congenial and use- ful existence. This may be called an ‘Agricultural Association,’ They will discover that they have the advantage over all individuals of like occupation in society, and that they will be enabled to supply the requirements of a populous village with more ease and profitable- ness than any dealer, merchant, or speculator.[68] The Lily Dale Spiritualist Assembly dedicated the Andrew Jackson Davis Lyceum at Lily Dale, located on the Children’s Acre, to Davis on July 15,1928. Today there is a maze, playground and campground in the area. According to the sign outside, the Lyceum has been used as a Sunday school and Community Center. Meetings are still held at the Lyceum during the camp season. Hill Cumorah and the Sacred Grove Joseph Smith, Jr. was a mystical treasure seeker from a family of mystical treasure seekers that used “seer stones,” rocks, to read secret messages from spirits. Fawn M. Brodie’s 1945 biography of Smith, No Man Knows My History, portrayed Smith’s religious awakening as a continuation of his mystical treasure seeking and earlier swindling ways.[69] Historian Alan Taylor argues that mystical treasure hunting was a fairly widespread practice in early New York that “met the needs of some people who felt troubled by their culture’s increasing premium on possessive individualism and religious voluntarism, by promising both quick wealth and a sense of power over the supernatural world.”[70] Taylor reports on Joseph Smith Junior, the Latter Day Prophet, and his father’s occult activity: To fend off the guardian spirits, the seekers laid out protective magic circles, or, better still, three concentric circles, around the digging ground. For some seekers a surrounding groove scooped out with a silver spoon or incised with a sword blade sufficed. The failure of these relatively simple circles encouraged experimentation with evermore elaborate designs. In 1833, William Stafford of Manchester, New York described one of Joseph Smith, Sr.’s magic circles: Both Smith’s parents and his grandfather reported having visions and communicating with God. In 1820, Joseph Smith Jr. entered the Sacred Grove next to his family’s farm in Palmyra, New York. God and Jesus came to him and reported that all the churches had turned their backs on them. Smith was being called to start his own church. In 1823, the angel Moroni came to him and told him he could find the golden plates, a breastplate and the seer stones that would help him interpret the plates on the Hill Cumorah. Smith returned to the hill four times, but only on the fourth attempt was he able to obtain the plates. He translated and interpreted them into what became the Book of Mormon in a cabin on the Smith Farm estate. Most Western New Yorkers are aware of the Hill Cumorah. If they have not been there personally, they are probably familiar with the flocks of pilgrims that made their way to the small town of Palmyra every summer to watch the famed Hill Cumorah pageant that told the story of how Mormon, the prophet, left golden plates for the Angel Moroni to later reveal to Joseph Smith. There is a theological debate within the LDS and Reorganized LDS (RLDS), a splinter group, over the canonical veracity of the claim that Cumorah in New York is the same Cumorah as is mentioned in the Book of Mormon. This debate has centered around the story of a cave within the hill. Smith was said to have left the plates and other religious treasures inside this cave. There is no such cave in the Hill Cumorah. However, Brigham Young and other early Mormons wrote of the significance of Cumorah in New York as a most sacred site.[72] The Hill Cumorah’s significance in the restoration of the gospel goes beyond its being the ancient repository of the metal plates known as the Book of Mormon. In the second half of the 19th century, a certain teaching about a cave in the hill began surfacing in the writings and teachings of several leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In their view, the hill was not only the place where Joseph Smith received the plates but also their final repository, along with other sacred treasures, after the translation was finished. According to some of those leaders, Joseph Smith and others returned the plates to a cave in the Hill Cumorah after he finished translating them. At least 10 different accounts, all secondhand, refer to this cave and what was found there.  1841 engraving of Cumorah Packer then examines each account in detail. He concludes: It is apparent that several of the early brethren viewed Joseph’s receiving the plates at the hill as the beginning of a war between good and evil. The unsheathed sword may therefore have been a sign that the struggle that began at Cumorah was still going on and that with the completed translation of the plates, the side of righteousness had just gained a powerful weapon in the war against evil—the Book of Mormon. It seems very fitting that the Lord, also known as the “man of war” (Exodus 15:3), would want Joseph Smith and others to know that this mortal experience is indeed a war and that He will conquer the enemies of righteousness. This may have reassured the Saints that divine help was on their side. Within the context of then-current events, namely, severe persecution of the fledgling church, the sword served as an effective teaching tool to emphasize that the Lord’s side would be victorious despite the apparent overwhelming odds against it. The LDS Church has recently announced that they will no longer be sponsoring the Hill Cumorah Pageant or pilgrimages to Hill Cumorah. LDS members told me that it is no longer an effective recruitment tool and the church has decided to put their resources into other things. The LDS members told me that they believed that the site would grow in significance as a historical and sacred site as the hindrance of the big public pageant is removed. Because of Covid-19, the final pageant, originally postponed until July 2021, has been cancelled indefinitely. As I climbed the steep hill up to the monument a dark cloud blew over and covered the sky. It had been a sunny day until that point. When I got up to the statue of Moroni the dark clouds were especially ominous. I got the idea that God did not want me there. The Sacred Grove is a short drive down the street from Hill Cumorah. It is also the historic site of the Smith Family Farm. According to the LDS History website: The Sacred Grove in Palmyra, New York, is the site where Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, visited young Joseph Smith in 1820. That visit, often called the First Vision, was the founding event of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Sacred Grove was part of the farmland originally owned by the Smith family, and today it is a healthy and peaceful forest that is open to the public year-round. Winding paths provide many places for visitors to contemplate the event that occurred here. … As I entered the Sacred Grove it started pouring rain. As I passed a sign that literally said, “If there is a thunderstorm please exit the Sacred Grove immediately due to unsafe conditions.” I walked through the Grove meditating. It really was a beautiful and dare I say spiritual place. The rain was pouring down and I got completely soaked. As I exited the Grove the rain let up and the sun came out. It was a very strange experience. I don’t think I would call it a religious experience, but it was perhaps spiritual in a purely symbolic, coincidental way. American socialist radicals have defended and even in some cases joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The American anarchist Dyer Lum wrote a treatise defending the LDS church and their polygamist practices entitled Utah and Its People: Facts and Statistics Bearing on the “Mormon Problem” in 1882. Lum visited Utah in 1879. He was impressed that Mormons could have transformed this desert land into a thriving civilization. Lum attributed their success to their theo-democratic, communitarian principles. He wrote, “...I do not believe this could have been accomplished by individual effort, that settlers isolated from each other, without mutual aid and assistance, would never have undertaken so great a task and could not have accomplished it.”[76] Lum concluded by appealing for tolerance and compassion for the polygamist Mormons lest the anger and iron fist of power directed toward them come after the anarchists next: Whatever we may think of polygamy as a social system, let us be careful how we act, and not fashion a handle for an axe which may one day striker nearer home when weilded by other passions…. Lum was not the only radical leftist that the LDS Church attracted. Historian Erik J. Freeman writes: In 1851, Pierre Isodore Bellanger, a romantic socialist and former Icarian communist, Preached the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to a multitude of farmers and workers in rural France. A crowd of ‘more than one hundred persons’ in the small town of Le Grade-Lucé eagerly gathered around this new missionary, listening to his message in the pouring rain from ‘half past two until ten at night.’ John Taylor, the Mormon apostle that converted Bellanger and other socialists in Paris, believed that interest in Mormonism served as evidence of ‘the advancement of the Redeemer’s Kingdom’ on the European continent.[78] Bellanger was one of many socialists that embraced the Mormon religion. Freeman explains: In 1847, Engels with fellow German radicals Karl Marx and Karl Schapper, referred to ‘Mormons’ as ‘a religious sect based upon communist principles.’ … During the nineteenth century, Mexican Fourierists, French Icarians, German-speaking Harmonists, along with working-class radicals from Great Britain all chose to convert to the LDS Church. More than 88,000 people converted to Mormonism from the laboring and lower-middling classes in Europe from 1830 to 1890.[79] The basis for socialism’s connections with Mormonism is the doctrine of the united order. In 1834, Joseph Smith commanded, “Verily I say unto you, my friends, I give unto you counsel, and a commandment, concerning all the properties which belong to the order which I commanded to be organized and established, to be a united order, and an everlasting order for the benefit of my church, and for the salvation of men until I come,” after seeing that some of his followers were suffering from poverty.[80] In 1874, Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, instituted the United Order of Enoch. According to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism: He organized the first United Order at St. George, Utah, on February 9, 1874. The last known Church-authorized United Order was organized at Cave Valley, Chihuahua, Mexico, on January 9, 1893. In the interim more than 200 united orders were organized in LDS communities in several mountain states, including Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Arizona, and Nevada, mostly in 1874 and 1875. This ambitious attempt to establish a utopian society was both a direct response to the forces that threatened LDS economic and political independence and a final effort by Brigham Young to build the ideal community envisioned by Joseph Smith.... Over the years Mormons, because of their socially conservative, pro-American beliefs, have become more right wing. Today, Mormons are said to be disproportionately represented in the CIA, FBI and ATF. Recruiters say Mormons are sought after because their patriotism, foreign missionary work, respect for authority, language abilities, abstention from intoxicants and relative honesty make it easy for them to get security clearance. According to journalist Sarah Laskow: There have been Mormon FBI agents since early in the bureau’s history. Some accounts allege that J. Edgar Hoover had a particular interest in recruiting Mormon agents: one well-known Mormon leader, J. Martell Bird, served in Hoover’s heyday, from the 1940s through the end of the ’60s, and there’s a famous story of a Mormon agent who, in 1940, just five years after the modern FBI was born from an earlier Bureau of Investigation, was tasked with supporting the agency’s first double agent, in Germany. The memory of the 2012 election is still fresh enough that most remember when Mitt Romney became the first Mormon to be endorsed for President by a major party. Most are not aware that in 1984 the socialist Peace and Freedom Party of California and the leftist Citizen’s Party endorsed an excommunicated Mormon, Sonia Johnson. Johnson was born in 1939. She became the fifth generation of her family to be associated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In 1977, she started agitating for the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that would recognize equality on the basis of sex and gender. The ERA was ultimately defeated by right wing legislators. There is still no amendment to the US Constitution that recognizes equal rights for women and denounces gender discrimination. Johnson founded a group called Mormons for ERA. In 1979 she gave a speech entitled “Patriarchal Panic: Sexual Politics in the Mormon Church” at a meeting of the American Psychological Association publicly denouncing illegal LDS lobbying efforts against passage of the ERA. The incident brought negative publicity to the LDS Church, so she was excommunicated in December of 1979. The excommunication letter contained inaccuracies and inconsistencies.[83] She ran for President of the United States on the Citizen’s Party ticket in 1984. The Citizen’s Party was a big tent progressive party that sought to unite socialists, environmentalists and left of center liberals in an electoral coalition. The Peace and Freedom Party and the Pennsylvania Consumer Party also endorsed her. Although religion has been used as an opium for the people to hide the scars of their suffering, it has also been a historically progressive cry of the oppressed creature. Radical religiosity need not lead to radical social, political and economic policy, necessarily, as the LDS example shows. However, historical examples like that of spiritualism have shown that new ways of thinking about the world in metaphysical terms may help platform new social, political and economic ways of thinking. Susan B. Anthony, for example, visited Lily Dale and spoke there on women’s suffrage. Shrewd socialist revolutionaries today can take heed of the religious ultraists of the past as examples of how to grow interest in the movement. Instead of taking a judgemental position when it comes to the religiosity of the proletariat, socialists can take a radical eccumenical approach, respecting the diverse religious traditions of the working class. Further study into historical religious ultraism may also open new possibilities for militant entryism and coalition building with organizations of faith. Notes [1] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 26. [2] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 26. [3] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 26. [4] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 27. [5] Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: the Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 138. [6] Way, “Evil Humors and Ardent Spirits,” 1400. [7] Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeepers Millenium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 121. [8] Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850, (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 154. [9] Cross, Burned-Over District, 158. [10] Cross, Burned-Over District, 173. [11] Ibid., 174. [12] Ibid., 173. [13] Ibid., 175. [14] Ibid., 179. [15] Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, 110. [16] Christopher Clark, The Communitarian Moment: the Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 30. [17] Cross, Burned-Over District, 190-191. [18] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 268. [19] Bestor, “Albert Brisbane - Propagandist,” 138 [20] “Exposition of Views and Principles,” 10. [21] “Exposition of Views and Principles,” 10. [22] Charles Fourier, The Social Destiny of Man or The Theory of the Four Movements, (New York: Gordon Press, 1972), 117. [23] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 141. [24] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 281. [25] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 540. [26] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 538. [27] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 61-62. [28] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 72. [29] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 550. [30] Charles Julius Hemple, The True Organization of the New Church as Indicated in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and Demonstrated by Charles Fourier, (New York: William Radde, 1848), 12. [31] Albert Brisbane, Association: Or, A Concise Exposition of the Practical Part of Fourier’s Science, (New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1843), 10 [32] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 280. [33] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 280. [34] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 284. [35] Arthur Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, (London: Cassell and Co., 1926), 16. [36] Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 31. [37] Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 32. [38] Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 17. [39] Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 31. [40] Frank Podmores, Robert Owen : a biography, (New York: Appleton, 1907), 604-605. [41] Robert Dale Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World: With Narrative Illustrations, (United Kingdom: Trübner, 1860), xiii. [42] “Introduction,” The Book of Mormon, (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, 2013), vii. [43] Richard Lyman Bushman, Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10-11. [44] Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 58. [45] Harry Houdini, Houdini: A Magician among the Spirits, (New York: Arno Press, 1972). [46] Harry Houdini, Houdini: A Magician among the Spirits, (New York: Arno Press, 1972). [47] Houdini, Houdini: A Magician among the Spirits. [48] “The Fox Sisters Property/Hydesville Memorial Park.” Haunted History Trail of New York State. Accessed May 21, 2019. https://hauntedhistorytrail.com/explore/the-fox-sisters-property-hydesville-memorial-park. [49] “Utopia, Utopia, Ohio.” RoadsideAmerica.com. Accessed May 21, 2019. https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/11893. [50] Randy McNutt, Finding Utopia: Another Journey into Lost Ohio, (Kent, OH: Black Squirrel Books, 2012), 16. [51] “What Happened to Utopia?” Spectrumlocalnews.com. Accessed May 21, 2019. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/untangled-with-josh-robin/2019/04/26/what-happened-to-utopia–nys. [52] McNutt, Finding Utopia, 19. [53] McNutt, Finding Utopia, 19. [54] Robert Owen, The Future of the Human Race: Or a Great, Glorious, and Peaceful Revolution Near at Hand, to be Effected Through the Agency of Departed Spirits of Good and Superior Men and Women, (United Kingdom: Effingham Wilson, 1854), 53. [55] Ron Nagy with Joyce LaJudice, The Spirits of Lily Dale, (Lakeville, MN: Glade Press, 2017), xiv. [56] Adam Crabtree, Animal Magnetism, Early Hypnotism, and Psychical Research, 1766–1925 – An Annotated Bibliography, (White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1988), introduction. [57] Nagy, The Spirits of Lily Dale, 1. [58] Nagy, The Spirits of Lily Dale, 5. [59] Nagy, The Spirits of Lily Dale, 9. [60] Paula Vogt, Lily Dale: Proud Beginnings, (Lily Dale, NY: Dale News, 1984), 90. [61] Arthur Myers, “Fox Cottage Burns: September 21, 1955,” (Lily Dale: Lily Dale Museum, ND). [62] Nagy, The Spirits of Lily Dale, 88-89. [63] Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 37. [64] Conan Doyle, The History of Spiritualism, 40. [65] Robert W. Delp, "Andrew Jackson Davis: Prophet of American Spiritualism," The Journal of American History 54, 1 (1967): 44. [66] Andrew Jackson Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations and a Voice to Mankind, (Boston: William White and Co., 1871), 747. [67] Davis, The Principles of Nature, 750. [68] Davis, The Principles of Nature, 748. [69] Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History, (New York, 1993). [70] Alan Taylor, “The Early Republics Supernatural Economy: Treasure Seeking in the American Northeast, 1780-1830,” American Quarterly 38, 1 (1986): 6. [71] Taylor, “The Early Republics Supernatural Economy,” 6. [72] Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). [73] Cameron J Packer, “Cumorah’s Cave,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 13, 1 (2004): 50. [74] Packer, “Cumorah’s Cave,” 57. [75] “Sacred Grove: Palmyra and Manchester, New York,” Latter Day Saints Church History, Accessed June 9, 2021, https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/subsection/historic-sites/new-york/palmyra/joseph-smith-family-farm-site-and-sacred-grove?lang=eng. [76] Dyer Lum, Utah and Its People: Facts and Statistics Bearing on the “Mormon Problem,” (New York: R. O. Ferrier and Co, 1882), 2. [77] Lum, Utah and Its People, 47. [78] Erik J. Freeman, "’True Christianity:’ The Flowering and Fading of Mormonism and Romantic Socialism in Nineteenth-Century France," Journal of Mormon History 44.2 (2018): 75. [79] Erik J. Freeman, “The Mormon International: Transnational Communitarian Politics and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1890,” 2020, Communal Studies Conference, Virtual, September 30, 2020, Communal Studies Associationr. [80] Joseph Smith, “Revelation to Joseph Smith,” April 23, 1834, History of the Church 2:54. [81] “United Orders,” Encyclopedia of Mormonism, (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 1493. [82] Sarah Laskow, “Why Mormons Make Great FBI Recruits,” Atlas Obscura, November 4, 2015. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-mormons-make-great-fbi-recruits. [83] Linda Sillitoe, “Church Politics and Sonia Johnson: The Central Conundrum”, Sunstone Magazine, 19, (1980). AuthorMitchell K. Jones is a historian and activist from Rochester, NY. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history from the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He has written on utopian socialism in the antebellum United States. His research interests include early America, communal societies, antebellum reform movements, religious sects, working class institutions, labor history, abolitionism and the American Civil War. His master’s thesis, entitled “Hunting for Harmony: The Skaneateles Community and Communitism in Upstate New York: 1825-1853” examines the radical abolitionist John Anderson Collins and his utopian project in Upstate New York. Jones is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Archives June 2021  Growing up I never felt there was much to be proud of about being an American. I grew up in the Jehovah’s Witness religion, so we never said the pledge of allegiance or anything. We were taught to be in the world, but no part of the world after Jesus’ direction. In the 1930s and 40s, German Jehovah’s Witnesses, at the time known as the International Society of Bible Students, were persecuted in the Holocaust for their stance of political neutrality and conscientious objection to war conscription. The Nazis made them wear purple triangles in the concentration camps to differentiate themselves from the gold stars, Jews; red triangles, communists; blue triangles, Romani etc. I eventually lost my faith in God and rejected a stance of political neutrality (as Howard Zinn said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train), but Christian values are still deeply ingrained in me. It was through my Christian values I came to pacificism when I was a pre-teen, anarchism when I was a teenager and communism when I became an adult. Our Kingdom Hall was completely integrated and my first best friend was black. We were a new religious movement and that was controversial stuff for the small Western New York town of Holley. My favorite teacher was gay. My religion and almost all my peers told me this made him a bad person. I just could not believe it. He was just such a good guy, one of the best I had met in Holley. I hated that town growing up. I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States hoping to get a ray of hope out of American history. When I was 17, I snuck out of my parents’ house to see Zinn speak at the University of Rochester in 2001, shortly after 9/11. He talked about how the rights we enjoy today were due to working class movements, suffragists, abolitionists, militants, socialists, communists, anarchists that pushed the boundaries of what was possible. But when I read his book, all I saw were atrocities. American history, if we are honest about it, is horrifying. It was not until I was well into adulthood that I discovered that Holley, my begrudging hometown, was named after Myron Holley, a founder of the Liberty Party, the first anti-slavery party in the USA. Holley was an early investor in the Erie Canal and made what for the time was a small fortune on the project. He decided to put much of his money into the cause he saw as most important at the time: abolition of enslavement of human beings. The Liberty Party eventually joined with the Free Soil Party and a few straggling Whigs to become the Republican Party, the anti-slavery third party that inspired the Civil War! I was shocked. How could this town that I hated growing up in so much actually have a radical origin? I decided to learn more about the history of the places around me after that. I found out that where I lived in Rochester was across the street from a utopian socialist who was active on the underground railroad. I was on the corner of Post and Anthony Street, in the historic 19th Ward neighborhood. Post refers to Amy and Isaac Post, radical Hicksite Quaker abolitionists who helped found the Western New York Anti Slavery Society (WNYASS) with Frederick Douglass and Huldah Anthony (Anthony as in Anthony street), Hicksite Quaker relatives of Susan B. Anthony, who lived for a time at the utopian socialist commune known as the Sodus Bay Phalanx. Right across the street there was a historical marker that said that a relative of Susan B. Anthony helped self-freed people escape to Canada from a house on that spot. It was Asa and Huldah Anthony’s house! They were socialists! When I started to explore these extant spaces and the stories of what happened there in the past, it made me feel as though my surroundings took on a new life. Everything seemed brighter and more inspiring. I would pine for that epiphanous EUREKA! moment when I would connect someone, some place or some event that I discovered to something else I was researching. It sent shivers down my spine as I thought to myself, “Oh! That’s what really happened!” This travel journal project is my attempt to share that feeling of pride and empowerment through knowledge that I have felt on my journeys. I hope that readers will take this work as a call for them to explore the sites of radical socialist history near them. You will be surprised, they are everywhere! Communism is Americanism I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. During the depression and the New Deal era socialist sympathies had reached a historic peak in America and despite the United States’ strategic military alliance with the Soviet Union against fascism, the American capitalist grew afraid of what Marx called “the spectre of communism” haunting the young, entrepreneurial country.[2] Ten days after president Harry S. Truman released the so-called “Truman doctrine” advocating international military intervention for the containment of the spread of communism abroad, he released executive order 9835, the Loyalty Order.[3] The Associated Press said the order affected everyone in government “from the President to the janitor in a small town post office” and effectively made it illegal to be a communist and work for the government.[4] This started a period of Cold War not only internationally, but also domestically. The government, corporations and society at large shunned, blacklisted and in many cases jailed communists and ruined their lives. The House of Unamerican Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts equated communism with the most vile evil and made it difficult for communists, socialists and anarchists to openly espouse their views in America for years to come. Only recently has the word “socialism” lost the aversive quality it once had. A 2016 Harvard University poll found that 51% of young people, ages 18-29, do not support capitalism and that 33% say they support socialism.[5] In the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary election self-described “democratic socialist” and independent Bernie Sanders earned 43% of the popular vote.[6] The Party for Socialism and Liberation, an American communist party, issued the following statement: Of major significance is that this massive outpouring of support is for a candidate who calls himself a socialist, in a country whose politics have been for so long dominated by virulent anti-communism and anti-socialism. Throughout the history of the United States, socialist presidential candidates have invariably been relegated to the margins. The fact that in 2015 a candidate who calls himself socialist is drawing huge crowds must be understood as a significant political development, regardless of the fact that his program is not revolutionary.[7] This is a significant political turning point in American political discourse. However, it is especially important to look to the examples of socialist movements from the American past to put the current status socialism enjoys in context. The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), under the leadership of Eric Browder, began to use the slogan “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” in order to link communist activities with the venerated revolutionary traditions of Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln.[8] In their 1939 election platform they wrote: Reactionaries of all shades cry out against socialism. They say it is revolutionary. True, the change to socialism will be revolutionary; but since when is revolution un-American? On the contrary, revolution is one of the most powerful traditions of our people who are among the most revolutionary in the world.[9] Leader of the Russian Revolution Vladimir Illich Ulyanov Lenin wrote to American workers in 1918, appealing to the rich revolutionary American tradition. Lenin did not believe American workers were fooled by the rich bosses who opposed the Bolsheviks. Lenin wrote: The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world…. In January 1865, Marx, Engels and other representatives of the Central Council of the International Workingmen’s Movement wrote to president Abraham Lincoln: The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.[11] Throughout American history the radical left has waged fights in favor of the most oppressed, most downtrodden members of society. Public programs like the Social Security Administration, the New Deal and public education are not socialism. America is not already socialist. However, socialists have indeed worked for these things and successful programs like them exist because socialists agitated for them. The revolutionary traditions of communism, socialism and anarchism have contributed to many rights and freedoms enjoyed by all Americans. Radical leftists continue to lead the charge against reactionism and in favor of progressive change; toward freedom, justice and equality. Early American Socialists From America’s founding, radicals who dreamed of a better world fought to shape the course of American politics. The first such radicals were the pre-Marxist utopian socialists who inspired and joined settlements in the “New World.” It may be difficult for post-Cold War readers to believe, but in the 1820s and 40s, many people throughout the country believed the communal spirit was elemental to the American creed.  Robert Owen Utopian socialist thinker Robert Owen was a wealthy industrialist who believed society should be shaped to design an individual’s character. He was a Scottish business man who witnessed the lower condition of his mill workers and determined that such inequality was immoral.[12] Owen had already become a well-known socialist in the United Kingdom. He requested to speak before Congress shortly after arriving in the United States. Congress granted his request. To the elite audience’s bemusement, Owen wasted no time in advocating the overthrow of the economic system. Thomas Jefferson, the second president of the United States, was among the famous dignitaries present that day.[13] Owen aped Jefferson’s own words. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”[14] The economic system elite Americans cherished, Owen argued, had become a despotic regime and it desperately needed overthrowing. The young nation could greatly increase liberty if the “national mind” rejected economic tyranny and embraced the “harmonious brotherhood” that his socialist system engendered.[15] Most in his audience thought Owen insane. Owen, however, was determined to prove them wrong by embarking on a series of practical experiments in socialism. In 1824 he invested almost all of his money into a utopian project, New Harmony, that he joined in Indiana.[16] This community espoused the moral, Christian virtues of equality, harmony between all people and freedom of religion.[17] New Harmony became a beacon for those seeking remedies to the rapidly apparent problems of the market revolution. Throughout the 1820s and 30s Owenism swept through America. Radicals formed about a dozen Owenite communes in the middle states of New York and Pennsylvania and on the Western frontier of Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee. Owen’s legacy stretches beyond even the communities that he started or inspired. Frederich Engels wrote in 1880, “Every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen.”[18] Owen helped push for the first law limiting working hours for women and children in British parliament in 1819. He was the leader of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Union, which attempted to join all trade unions in England into a single federation from 1834 to 1835. He also first introduced the idea of worker owned cooperative businesses in England. Engels explained the significance of these achievements, “These have since that time, at least, given practical proof that the merchant and the manufacturer are socially quite unnecessary.”[19] Despite preaching harmony, Engels believed Owen made the contradictions between capital and labor even more clear. Owen’s son, Robert Dale, continued to contribute this same legacy to the political development of the United States.  Robert Dale Owen Robert Dale Owen became a politician in Indiana. He was active with the Workingmen’s Party while living in New York City from 1829 to 1830. After moving back to New Harmony from New York in 1832, Owen served as a Democratic Party member of the Indiana House of Representatives from 1835 to 38 and again from 1851 to 53. As a Representative, he introduced the bill that founded the Smithsonian Institution. In 1850, the people of Indiana elected him to Indiana’s Constitutional Convention. Thanks to Robert Dale Owen, the state constitution established the public schooling system in Indiana.[20] Noyes wrote of him, “Robert Dale Owen undoubtedly has been and is the spiritual as well as natural successor of Robert Owen. Wiser and more moderate than his father, he has risen out of the wreck of New Harmony to high stations and great influence in this country.”[21] Education reform was a key issue to many of the antebellum socialists. Although American educators formed the first public schools in the mid-17th century in New England, colonial education of children primarily took place in the home.[22] By the 1830s, the First International Workingmen’s Movement had reached North America. It was a reaction to the mass production and monopolization of capitalism, which the men and women of the Workingmen’s Movement saw as taking away their way of life. Robert Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, was an organizer with the Workingmen’s Movement in New York City at the time.[23] They believed education would be a fortification for the workers against the growing inequality resulting from monopoly capitalism. In the fall of 1830, the Workingmen of New York City nominated candidates for public office demanding free, public education, arguing, “[U]nless this safeguard of liberty is secured, and by enlightening the mass, the axe of knowledge is laid at the root of aristocracy, there is effected, as it were, nothing. The best labours are lost, and success of the present is ever hazarded in the future.”[24] The “monopoly of talent” was an affront to democratic values. Aristocratic education secured knowledge for the rich and ignorance for the poor. Robert Dale Owen and the Workingmen feared this would create permanent classes and a return to feudalism. By the 1840s, the egalitarian, democratic ideas of the Workingmen had infiltrated the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Responding to the call for economic intervention after the Panic of 1837, the Democrats made education reform a major plank of their 1839 platform.[25] Robert Owen Senior, too, was extremely interested in educational reform. According to historian Frank T. Carlton: In the educational scheme exemplified in the New Harmony schools were incorporated a variety of principles and methods, which have finally found, or are finding, lodgment in our public-school system. Nearly a century ago Owen advocated free and universal education. Owen made the kindergarten and the industrial school integral parts of his school system. He urged that classical education, so called, should not be ‘thrust down the throats of all its unwilling victims.’ The ‘school city’ form of government was advocated.[26] The elder Owen left America in 1827. He had lost £40,000 on his utopian venture in New Harmony.[27] He left a part of New Harmony to his sons. In addition to Robert Dale, Richard, David Dale and William Owen all lived and worked at New Harmony throughout the late 1820s and 30s.[28] By June of 1828, Robert Owen had given up on the communitarian project. He sold and leased individual plots of land to individuals who still wanted to live there.[29] Josiah Warren left New Harmony in 1828, but by the 1840s had returned and set up a Time Store.[30] Warren rejected the communitarianism of Owen in favor of his own philosophy of individualist anarchism. He denounced the Owenite projects as authoritarian. However, he still held true the notion that one’s character was formed for them, not by them, which had become an axiom of Owenism. Warren wrote: Being subject to the influence of the circumstances around me, and being liable to be moulded by them, whether true or false, right or wrong, and having nothing to protect me from error and misery, but the knowledge which I may require of these circumstances, and the use I may make of this knowledge, I shall begin to analyze the circumstances around me and learn to distinguish the good from the evil; and as I have heretofore been misled by false instruction and by bad example, I shall claim the free exercise of my own judgment with regard to my own opinions and my own conduct.[31] Warren argued individual discernment, not social control, should be the basis of a harmonious society. He called the Time Store by that name because it accepted “labor notes” in exchange for items. The notes represented a certain number of labor hours. The price of an item represented the number of labor hours required to produce the item plus the clerk’s fee. The clerk calculated their fee by starting a large clock when the customer entered the establishment and stopping it when the customer was finished shopping. The clerk then translated the number of minutes they performed customer service into labor hours and added it to the customer’s total.[32] Warren did not believe in community of property as Owen did. He based his Time Store on Adam Smith's labor theory of value. Warren believed merchants must base prices on the amount of labor it takes to make them, not market or commodity exchange value. He was an extreme individualist. Warren’s Time Store exemplified the modified form of capitalism that he advocated. The town was set up with the explicit intention of establishing fairness and equality in business and commerce.[33] Although the project did not last long, it was exemplary of the open-minded, revolutionary spirit of the young nation.  1824 portrait of Frances Wright by Henry Inman Nashoba was another Owen-inspired utopian community in Tennessee. Abolitionist Frances “Fanny” Wright founded the colony in 1825. Apparently, “Fanny Wright” became a pejorative term after Nashoba’s failure and the Skaneateles Community were targets of the invective phrase.[34] Despite its eventual failure, Nashoba was remarkable for being the first American utopian experiment to tie abolitionism with socialism. According to utopian chronicler A. J. MacDonald, who visited Nashoba in the 1830s: The objects were, to form a Community in which the negro slave should be educated and upraised to a level with the whites, and thus prepared for freedom; and to set an example, which, if carried out, would eventually abolish slavery in the Southern States; also to make a home for good and great men and women of all countries, who might there sympathize with each other in their love and labor for humanity.[35] Fanny Wright and her supporters purchased slaves at auctions and attempted to educate them in self-reliance and communal living to prepare them for life as free people. MacDonald visited the colony in 1825 and reported, “She invited congenial minds from every quarter of the globe to unite with her in the search for truth and the pursuit of rational happiness.”[36] Wright attempted to draw on the popularity of social reform to make a practical difference in the struggle against slavery. Religious communism inspired Wright's plan. She visited sectarian religious communes throughout the South, including those of the United Believers in Christ’s Second Coming or Shakers and the Harmony Society, known as Rappites after their founder Johann Georg Rapp. Both groups had practiced bible-based communism since the beginning of the 19th century. Eventually, Wright studied the projects of the non-religious, freethinking Owenites at New Harmony, Indiana.[37] She concluded a socialist system similar to those practiced by the communities she visited was best suited to help blacks achieve their emancipation. The community failed the same way most of the Owenite projects did. It fell into financial ruin because it could not generate profitable income. The response from the accounting trustees of Nashoba was to abandon the Owenite notion that a person's character was created for them, not by them. In 1828, the trustees of Nashoba published a declaration that undermined the abolitionist aspect of the project. Wright explains: They [the trustees] show the impossibility of a co-operative Community succeeding without the members composing it are [sic] superior beings; ‘for,’ say they, ‘if there be introduced into such a society thoughts of evil and unkindness, feelings of intolerance and words of dissension, it can not prosper.’ That which produces in the world only common-place jealousies and every-day squabbles, is sufficient to destroy a Community.[38] She clarified, “superior beings” were those with “moral qualifications..., who may be admitted without regard to color,” who are able to pay $100 per year for board and could build their own house.[39] This price would have been virtually impossible for enslaved people to raise. The decree effectively ended the Nashoba experiment’s practical abolitionism.  Charles Fourier Another pre-Marxist socialist who inspired utopian communities throughout the young American nation was the French philosopher Charles Fournier. His ideas led to the formation of many utopian communities throughout the young United States, most notably Brook Farm in Massachusetts and the North American Phalanx in New Jersey. Horace Greeley, the publisher of the New York Weekly Tribune who would later run for president against Ulysses S. Grant was one of Fourier’s most enthusiastic disciples. Greeley was the son of a New Hampshire farmer.[40] In the 1820s, his father hit “bad times” and creditors and police began to hound him.[41] The Greeley family moved from place to place throughout the 1820s. Horace struggled to support himself until in 1826, at the age of fifteen, he took a printer’s apprenticeship in Poultney, Vermont.[42] The apprenticeship made him a servant, beholden to a master. After his term of servitude ended, he went cautiously into the precarity of wage work.[43] Luckily, he made his way to New York City, where he found success in the printing business.[44] However, the struggles of his modest upbringing followed him. A rival newspaper editor wrote of him: The editor of the Tribune is the son of a poor and humble farmer; came to New York a minor, without a friend within 200 miles, less than ten dollars in his pocket, and precious little besides; hes has never had a dollar from a relative, and has for years labored under a load of debt, (thrown on him by others’ misconduct and the revulsion of 1837) which he can now just see to the end of.[45]  Horace Greeley Greeley, although now a wealthy New York City socialite, still wore the scars of a son of the working class. His economic rivals never missed an opportunity to remind him of his humble beginnings. The Panic of 1837 destined Greeley to be on the side of the downtrodden and oppressed. He would dedicate himself to this cause for the rest of his life.  Albert Brisbane[46] In 1839 Greeley wrote “a series of articles entitled ‘What shall be done for the laborer?’”[47] He fatefully acquainted himself with Fourierist agitator Albert Brisbane the same year. Greeley continues, “I believe these [articles] attracted the attention of Mr. Albert Brisbane, a young man of liberal education and varied culture, a native of Batavia, N.Y., which he still regarded as his home, but who had traveled widely and observed thoughtfully; making the acquaintance in Paris of… Charles Fourier….”[48] In 1842, Greeley allowed Brisbane to purchase a regular column in his widely read New York Weekly Tribune for $500.[49] Albert Brisbane was on the front lines of the economic and cultural changes taking place in Western New York from his birth. He was born in 1809 in Batavia, New York.[50] Batavia, about 35 miles west of Rochester, was America’s frontier at the turn of the 19th century. Foreign speculation was responsible for its emergence. Joseph Ellicott, a surveyor for the Dutch investment group the Holland Land Company, founded the town in 1802.[51] In his autobiography Brisbane remarks that the founders of Batavia were ex-Quakers and “men of liberal views.”[52] Albert’s father, James Brisbane, came to Batavia with the Holland Land Company early on. He got a loan from the company to start a store. By 1821, he had made over a half a million dollars from investing in land.[53] Young Albert enjoyed the freedom of frontier life. He owned three guns at the age of ten and his parents allowed him to wander the forests hunting and riding horses.[54] At the age of fifteen he had a sudden “spontaneous intuition” while hunting. Brisbane recalled: I remember standing on the bridge that crosses the little creek at Batavia one day, and musing as I threw pebbles into the water and observed the widening, rippling circles as they started from the center. New problems were forming themselves in my mind, though not yet brought clearly and definitely to the touchstone of consciousness. This solitary musing took possession of me. The intuitions of the mind were gradually molding their external expression, and it finally came in this shape: What is the work of man on this earth? What was he put here for, and what has he to do? I said to myself: If the individual man does not know what the work of the collective man is, he has no guide to his career. It seemed to me that I belonged to a vast army in which each individual had his place and function, and that those who left the rank to attend to individual concerns could not advance in the great achievement to which they were destined. The army was Humanity. I was a soldier in its ranks.[55] From that day on a sense of duty to the so-called army of humanity drove Brisbane to action. He studied in New York City and became interested in philosophy. In May 1828, his parents agreed to send him to France.[56] During an intermission at the Paris Opera, Brisbane had a second revelation. He went out to get some ice cream and had an internal dialogue: ‘Who pays for this ice cream? Brisbane thought about this for some time until he concluded, “a certain class in society live on the labor of the masses….”[58] He realized that he was of that class that benefits from the work of others. These two revelations led Brisbane on a lifelong philosophical journey to find a form of society that elevated the whole of humanity and did away with contradictions between the classes. The journey first led him to Germany, in search of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Then, in 1830, he travelled to Turkey, Greece, Ireland and finally back to France.[59] Brisbane studied the French utopian thinker Saint-Simon, but was not fully satisfied. Finally, after reading Charles Fourier’s A Treatise on Domestic and Agricultural Association, which a friend had sent him, Brisbane found his prophet.[60] He wrote, “...I came to the following phrase printed in large type: ‘Attractive Industry.’ Those two words made on me an indescribable impression…. I sprang to my feet, threw down the book, and began pacing the floor in a tumult of emotions.”[61] The idea that a planned economic system could organize work so that it was dignified and pleasant was a compelling revelation. In May 1832, Brisbane finally met Fourier at the offices of the Fourierist publication La Réforme industrielle in Paris. He paid him for private lessons in his theory.[62] Brisbane returned to the United States in 1834. He first began his Fourierist agitation in Western New York, convincing sarsaparilla seller and druggist C. C. Bristol to support eight editions of the first Phalanx newspaper. In 1839, he formed a Fourier society in New York City.[63] In 1840, he published Social Destiny of Man; or, Association and Reorganization of Industry, the first complete survey of Fourier’s philosophy in English.[64] In 1842, Greeley allowed Brisbane to purchase a regular column in his widely read New York Weekly Tribune for $500.[65] Brisbane adapted Fourier’s theories to the sensibilities of an American audience, focusing mainly on his economic program and avoiding his libertine sexual ideas and other peculiar beliefs. He spoke to Americans about social problems that affected them, not about the symphonies of the cosmos and human tail evolution that preoccupied Fourier the Frenchman. By 1841, Greeley completely converted to the gospel of Fourier as translated by Brisbane. He explained, “Association affirms that every child born into the world has a rightful claim upon the community around him for subsistence, until able to earn for himself an education, which shall enable him to ear efficiently, as well as rightly to improve and enjoy; and for the opportunity to earn at all times, by ones industry, steadily employed and justly remunerated.”[66] Greeley believed Brisbane’s preoccupation was a natural solution to the problems presented by the crisis of 1837. Albert Brisbane translated Charles Fourier into English and published his treatises in easily distributable pamphlets. He made French radicalism palatable to the Christian Yankees that opposed slavery, but were turned off by Fourier’s views on free love. Most importantly, Brisbane made Fourierism make sense to both the proletariat and petit bourgeois victims of the Panic of 1837.[67] Brisbane believed associated industry offered to secure prosperity for all, regardless of class, educate the masses, drive innovation and enculture morality. If it could offer even a fraction of its promises, it was certainly worth attempting. Brisbane wrote in 1843: If a Social Reform can be effected, which will dignify Industry and render it attractive, increase immensely production or real wealth - secure abundance to the Poor and permanent prosperity to the Rich - extend the refining and elevating influence of superior education to all - widen the sphere of intellectual existence and combine the pleasures of Art and Science and social Life with the pursuits of useful Industry, how desirable would be the result, and how worthy of the persevering efforts of men of pure motives and exalted ambition.[68] Larger than life philosophers like Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley did not sway everyone. The Nothingarians, so-called because they did not claim to follow any leader or ideology, of the Northampton Association followed a path led not by ideology, but by their own sense of business practicality. They saw individual entrepreneurship as inherently reckless and unstable. Large-scale industry required collective investment and cooperative labor in order to avoid unscrupulousness and over adventurous capitalism.[69] Most of the Northampton Association’s founding members were industrialists or farmers who had lost money in the Panic of 1837. Several were silk manufacturers. During the Panic of 1837, many investors felt it was responsible to invest in the silk trade. A second economic bubble burst in 1839, decimating the silk industry.[70] Farmers and silk manufacturers scrambled to figure out what to do. The Northampton Association bought what remained of the Northampton Silk Company in 1841, hoping to profit from the once lucrative industry while avoiding the instability of capital markets. They believed communal association would provide the security they sought.[71] According to historian Chris Clark, “As former manufacturers and traders, they sought not to overthrow the existing economic system, but to organize it on more stable and equitable principles.”[72] The Northampton Association was, as John Humphrey Noyes claims, a preparation for Fourierism. Fourierism sought to produce harmony and security in labor relations, not to exacerbate class struggle. The Northampton Association was Nothinarian, but their rational inquiry led them as close to the Fourierist system as they could be while still claiming to espouse “nothing.” Many in the Northampton Association were Garrisonian abolitionists prior to their involvement in associated industry. Economic factors forced the abolitionist movement to undergo its own tactical and theoretical Panic of 1837. Massachusetts capitalist, evangelical Christian and abolitionist Arthur Tappan had been a valuable financier of the Massachusetts anti-slavery movement. Tappan made a great deal of money during the Market Revolution in the 1820s from his silk importing business in New York City.[73] New Yorkers knew Tappan to connect business and religion. He demanded his employees live in Christian boarding houses and attend church every week.[74] Like utopian socialist Robert Owen, who attempted to put his utopian ideals into practice at his textile factory in New Lanark, Scotland, Tappan attempted to blend business and his belief in the reorganization of society.[75] By the early 1830s, Tappan became a financier of Massachusetts abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper the Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS).[76] However, on May 1, 1837 the silk bubble burst and Tappan had to declare bankruptcy. The abolitionist movement in Massachusetts went into a panic. They lost their largest financial backer.[77] Tappan led a walkout of evangelicals at the 1840 meeting of the American Antislavery Society protesting women’s involvement in the group.[78] Garrison and other Massachusetts radicals who were in favor of women in antislavery leadership, loosed from Tappan’s patronage, saw an opportunity. They reevaluated their tactics. They began to reject as wholly corrupt everything they considered “worldly." This included governments and institutional churches.  William Lloyd Garrison Garrison increasingly advocated nonresistance, a form of nonviolent civil disobedience, and anarchistic no-government ideas. In 1852, Garrison explained, “Non-Resistance is not a state of passivity, on the contrary, it is a state of activity, ever fighting the good fight of faith, ever foremost to assail unjust power, ever struggling for ‘liberty, equality, fraternity,’ in no national sense, but in a world-wide spirit. It is passive only in this sense — that it will not return evil for evil, nor give blow for blow, nor resort to murderous weapons for protection or defense.”[79] Many interpreted Garrison’s plea for nonresistance not as a call to reject all institutions. Christopher Clark argues, “Though they attacked existing ‘human government,’ they sought to establish the ‘government of God’ and social institutions that could embody it.”[80] Christian perfectionism influenced the nonresistance and no-government advocates to build better institutions that could respond to the challenges of the day. Clark concludes, “Nonresistance in this form led not to a rejection of institutions as such but to a search for new social organizations uncorrupted by existing evils.”[81] At least twenty of the Northampton Association’s founders were non-resistance advocates.[82] John A. Collins and John O. Wattles of the Skaneateles Community were also advocates of nonresistance and no-government principles. The early utopian communities mostly ended abruptly, exposing weaknesses in this form of socialism. Frederick Engles wrote of Fournier and Owen in 1880: Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had... produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from that of the French philosophers.[83] Oneida Community leader John Humphrey Noyes’ volume A History of American Socialisms is the most extensive history of the early American socialist movement. Noyes established the Oneida Community in 1848. He hoped to take the best parts of the religious and non-religious utopian societies and apply them to his own “bible communist” utopia.[84] In order to fulfill this task, Noyes researched previously existing communities. In 1869, he wrote one of the most comprehensive histories of 19th century American socialism that exists to this day. Noyes compiled it only a few short years after the dissolution of many of the projects it describes. Noyes draws on extensive primary evidence including utopian chronicler A. J. MacDonald's unpublished eyewitness manuscript, socialist newspapers from the period, letters and phalanx documents. Much of this evidence is still extant. Scholars have not explored much of it since historian Arthur Eugene Bestor Jr.’s research in the 1940s. Bestor wrote, “Of all the freedoms for which American stood, none was more significant for history than the freedom to experiment with new practices and new institutions.”[85] Freedom of religion was codified into the first the United States Constitution in 1788, but religious groups fleeing persecution in Europe were making pilgrimages to the New World as early as the 1630s. While violent religious disputes made social experimentation heresy punishable by death and expulsion in Europe, settlers in the colonies enjoyed the freedom to organize society as they pleased. Bestor explained, “What remained mere speculation in the Old World had a way of becoming reality in the New.”[86] The refugees of European intolerance created communities based on their utopian visions in America, a site uniquely situated to allow social experimentation. The young nation was susceptible to radical social experimentation from its founding. Noyes, like Bestor, argued the utopian socialist movement in America was a continuation of the Second Great Awakening and the teachings of Charles Finney.[87] While many of the socialists of the Owenite and Fourierist periods were atheists or freethinkers, the earlier and more institutional communist societies were religious. The Shakers, the Zoarites and the Amanas all lived communally in America before Robert Owen first visited in 1824. Noyes believed socialism should not be separate from religion.[88] The revivalist religious tradition inspired individuals to reform their souls. For John Humphrey Noyes, only religion provides sufficient “afflatus” or collective motivation to carry out the work that socialism requires. American Marxism Marx and Engels wrote about the experimental communes throughout the United States (US) during the 1830s-1840s. They devoted a whole section of their influential Manifesto of the Communist Party to a critique of utopian socialism. In an 1844 letter, Engels wrote, “For communism, social existence and activity based on community of goods, is not only possible but has actually already been realised [sic] in many communities in America… with the greatest success….”[89] Engels cheered the utopian movements in the United States. However, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, he critiqued this early kind of socialism as utopian and unscientific. He describes utopianisms as “pictures of ideal social conditions.”[90] Almost all the utopian communes in the United States failed quickly and miserably. Lack of pragmatism, planning and accounting for the ruthlessness of the market belie the failures of the utopian socialist projects. Nevertheless, Engels pointed to another factor as the main reason for the failure of the utopians. The leaders were not representatives of the working class. They sought to uplift the condition of all classes and believed there was a chance to reconcile the contradictions between capital and labor. It is ironic that Engels would take such a position since he himself was the son of a factory owner. Engels, despite ruthlessly critiquing utopian socialist projects in the United States, acknowledged them as foundational to the later, more politically influential, Marxist conceptualization of communism.[91] Karl Marx found fellow travelers at Horace Greeley’s New York Weekly Tribune.[92] Charles A. Dana was managing editor of the Tribune at the time. Dana had also been a Fourierist. He lived at the Fourierist commune at Brook Farm in Massachusetts from 1841 to 1846. By 1846, Dana became disillusioned with Fourierism and became interested in the work of Marx’s rival, French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.[93] In 1848, Dana met Marx in Cologne.[94]  Charles A. Dana[95] Dana was enthusiastic about signing Marx up as a correspondent for the Tribune. The European Revolutions of 1848 had shook the Fourierist foundational belief in the possibility of harmony between capital and labor. Dana and others were eager to discover other strains of socialist thought.[96] The Tribune ended up being the most lucrative employment Marx enjoyed in his entire life. Between October 1861 and March 1862, Marx wrote his last nine pieces for the Tribune. All nine dealt with the American Civil War.[97]For Marx and Engels the struggle against slavery was essential to the progressive material and social development of the United States. Early American socialism had been a harmonious cooperation between the proletariat and the petit bourgeoisie. However, as the 19th century wore on, the issue of slavery would make class contradictions more clear and class struggle more militant. In 1864, Marx and Engels wrote to Abraham Lincoln: While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.[98] Communists would play key roles in the struggles against slavery and racism. Joseph Weydemeyer, widely considered the first American Marxist, was a military officer in the Kingdom of Prussia prior to coming to the United States.[99] In 1846 he came into contact with Marx’s works and discovered them to be in line with his own thinking.[100] In 1851 Weydemeyer arrived in New York as a political exile and began to distribute Marx and Engels’ writings.[101] In 1861 he moved to Missouri to join the effort to fight the Confederates and by 1864 had become a Colonel in the Union army.[102] His leadership was key in the emancipation of St. Louis and the prevention of annexation of Missouri by the Confederates. August Willich was another German-American communist who fought in the Civil War. Willich then led a “left wing” faction of “True Socialists” that, in 1850, split from the Communist League over disagreements with Marx. In 1853, Willich immigrated to the United States. Willich enlisted in the first call to arms of the American Civil War in 1861 with the first German regiment, which later became the ninth Ohio regiment. Indiana Governor Oliver P. Morton, so impressed with Willich’s service, requested he take command as colonel of the 32nd Indiana Infantry Regiment. The 32nd saw action at Shiloh and repelled an attack by Texas Rangers on November 26, 1861. Confederates captured Willich at the battle of Stone River, December 31, 1862, but they paroled him in exchange for a Confederate prisoner of war in 1863.[103] Willich met president Lincoln in May of that year.[104] He remained active in many important Civil War battles and he rose quickly through the Union Army ranks. The army gave him the rank of major general on October 21, 1865. After the war, he became the auditor for Hamilton County, Ohio.[105] Despite their disagreements, Marx felt moved to write about him, “In the Civil War in North America, Willich showed that he is more than a visionary.”[106] Marx was optimistic about the “American Antislavery War.” He argued the emancipation of black chattel slaves would lead to a new ascendancy for the working class. He even argued a nonviolent proletarian revolution was possible in America after the Civil War. According to Marx, if they were politically enfranchised, freed blacks could join with impoverished farmers to create a strong labor party that could take state power without a violent uprising.[107] Marxist historian Robert Blackburn writes that according to Marx, “Defeating the slave power and freeing the slaves would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black.”[108] Although Marx’s dream of a non-violent proletarian revolution did not come to fruition, the Civil War did lead to new opportunities for the American working class. His predictions came partially true in 1866, a year after the official end of the fighting, when American workers formed the National Labor Union (NLU), the first national labor federation in America. The NLU opened new avenues of collective power for workers. However, the emergence of labor organizations was not the only sign of hope for a positive outcome for black and white workers after the American Civil War. Since the Southern bourgeoisie considered chattel slaves property, not humans, emancipation of blacks from Southern slavery would mean one of the greatest expropriations of private property from the bourgeoisie in human history.[109] The Southern slave owners would have their wealth (slaves) seized and redistributed to the working class (emancipated blacks). Unfortunately, the Compromise of 1877 would put an end to Marx’s prophesied anti-racist, social democratic South. Following the collapse of Reconstruction, the Southern racists instituted the “Jim Crow” system of segregation. White and black Communists militantly opposed segregation. One of the earliest struggles for civil rights in the Jim Crow south was what came to be known as the “Scottsboro boys” trial. The so-called “Scottsboro boys” were nine black teenagers who were accused of raping two white women in 1931. The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) intervened in the trial, considering it a travesty of justice and indicative of the racism of the Jim Crow south. According to James Goodman in Stories of Scottsboro the CPUSA was instrumental in bringing the injustice of this case to the public’s attention. He wrote: Only after the [CPUSA] brought the truth about Alabama's legal lynching to the world's attention did the NAACP step in, and even then it could conceive of the case as nothing more than a rape case: the organization could set no goal greater than the 'legalistic illusion' of a fair trial. It could not see that there was 'no such thing as a "fair trial" of the Negro boy accused of rape in an Alabama court,' dominated as that court was by the southern ruling class. Nor could it see that 'behind the ghastly crime of the frame-up' was 'the whole question of the exploitation, persecution, disfranchisement, and constant murder of Negroes.’[110] In 1961 the late civil rights activist and scholar W. E. B. Dubois applied to become a member of the CPUSA. He wrote in a letter to Gus Hall, the Party’s chairperson at the time: Today I have reached my conclusion: Dubois’ conversion led civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to say, in his eulogy to Dubois, in 1968: We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life the English-speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O’Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest living poet though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational, obsessive anti-communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking.[112] The Marxist-Leninist idea of a revolutionary vanguard would go on to inspire American black leaders to conclude that black power and community self defense were necessary to achieve liberation. Rob Williams, a leader in the NAACP, was one of the first black militants to advocate armed community self defense. In 1961, the same year Dubois joined the CPUSA, Williams fled to Cuba and then to China to avoid a trumped up kidnapping charge.[113] Williams wrote of Socialist Cuba: When I realized that I would not be safe in Canada, I remembered my two trips to Cuba. I could think of no other place in the Western Hemisphere where a Negro would be treated as a human being, where the race problem would be understood, and where people would not look upon me as a criminal but as a victim of a trumped-up charge - a charge designed to crush the militant leaders who were beginning to form a new movement, a new militant movement designed for the total liberation of the Afro-Americans.[114] Rob Williams was highly influential to one of the most prominent communist parties in American history: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPP). The BPP was founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. In addition to teaching classes on armed self defense and Maoism, the BPP had an extensive “survival” program. Services under this program included free breakfast for school children, free tuberculosis clinics, drug and alcohol addiction counseling and free grocery programs. Although the FBI’s brutal and violent Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was successful in destroying the BPP, many of their “survival program” services became institutions that still exist today. The Black Panthers linked the oppression of black people in America to the exploitative system of capitalism. They were among the first black radicals to synthesize black nationalism and Marxism-Leninism and to tie the struggle of what BPP minister of information Eldridge Cleaver described as the “black colony” with the anti-colonial struggles in Cuba, China and Vietnam.[115] Many in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement today are still inspired by this idea. Most exemplary are the BLM activists who say “Assata taught me,” referring to Black Panther activist Assata Shakur who is still living in exile in Cuba. These are only a few examples of the tenacious, militant work done by Communists, the fruits of which were the abolition of slavery, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts and community defense against American Fascist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Communists and revolutionary socialists continue to be involved in and an inspiration to black liberation movements today including those opposing police brutality and mass incarceration, advocating affirmative action, educational desegregation and reparations for slavery. There are many more examples of communist and socialist involvement in the early feminist, indigenous sovereignty, workers’ rights, New Deal, integration, LGBT rights and welfare rights movements. American socialists fought for and won many of the freedoms Americans enjoy today including the public educational system, unions, the New Deal, temporary cash assistance, Section 8 housing, SNAP, Medicaid, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, OSHA, EPA, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, academic freedom, the 14th, 15th and 26th Amendments to the United States Constitution. The truth is, if you’re American, you have more reason to thank a communist for your freedom than you do a soldier. American communists stand on the shoulders of giants. We have a rich history of which we should be proud. Far from being ashamed of being Americans, we should proudly declare that we are the nation of Tekanawíta the Great Peacemaker, Robert Owen, Albert Brisbane, John Humphrey Noyes, Sojourner Truth, Joseph Weydemeyer, August Willich, Peter H. Clark, William Z. Foster, James W. Ford, Daniel DeLeon, Earl Browder, Eugene V. Debs, Joe Hill, John Reed, Harry Haywood, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Agnes Smedley and countless other American socialist heroes. My travels have attempted to regain a sense of pride in my place of birth and to restore a sense of wonder and excitement to our late-capitalist American landscape. Revisiting the sites where some of the most revolutionary events of American history occurred reinvigorates the mundanity of the present with electrical echoes of the radical past. I hope this work will inspire you, the reader, to visit the sacred sites of militant American history near you, record your feeling of re-electrification and pride in the places where you are from and share it with the world. Works Cited [1] John Steinbeck, “A Primer on the 30’s,” Esquire, 1960, 21. [2] Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Portable Karl Marx, edited by Eugene Kamenka, (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 204. [3] Albert E. Khan, High Treason: The Plot Against the People, (Lear Publishers. 1950), 268. [4] Khan, High Treason, 268-269. [5] Max Ehrenfreund, “A majority of millennials now reject capitalism, poll shows,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/26/a-majority-of-millennials-now-reject-capitalism-poll-shows/?utm_term=.dadbf2ee909c Accessed 4 July 2017. [6] Nate Silver, “Was The Democratic Primary A Close Call Or A Landslide?” FiveThirtyEight. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/was-the-democratic-primary-a-close-call-or-a-landslide/ Accessed 4 July 2017. [7] Liberation Staff, “PSL statement on the Sanders campaign,” Liberation News, https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-sanders-campaign/ Accessed 4 July 2017. [8] Communist Party of the USA, The Communist Election Platform, (New York: Workers’ Library Publishers, 1936), 15. [9] Communist Party of the USA, The Communist Election Platform, 15. [10] Vladimir Lenin, “Letter To American Workers[1],” Letter To American Workers, Accessed May 25, 2021. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/20.htm. [11] Karl Marx, Marx on America and the Civil War, (New York: Saul K. Padover, 1972), 237. [12] Robert Owen, Life of Robert Owen, (New York: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1920), vi. [13] Owen and Jefferson corresponded in 1825. Owen wanted to introduce his friends, who were interested in the architecture of Virginia University, to Jefferson. Apparently, Jefferson had inquired about Owen’s “system.” Owen promised his friends would report to Jefferson on the system’s progress. In his 1858 autobiography, Owen describes Jefferson as his “warm disciple.” John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, (New York: J. B. Lippencott & Co., 1870), 44., Robert Owen to Thomas Jefferson, November 25, 1825, Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib025573/., Robert Owen, The Life of Robert Owen, (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd., 1920), 275. [14] Thomas Jefferson, et al, July 4, Copy of Declaration of Independence. -07-04, 1776. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib000159/. [15] Frederick A. Packard, Life of Robert Owen, (Philadelphia: Ashmead & Evans, 1866), 200. [16] Owen, Life of Robert Owen, vii. [17] Packard, Life of Robert Owen, 203. [18] Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling, (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1892), 25. [19] Engels, Socialism, 25. [20] Frank Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography, (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 328. [21] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 85. [22] Rush Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 9. [23] Frank Podmore, Robert Owen: A Biography, (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 328. [24] Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America, 46. [25] Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America, 64. [26] Frank T. Carlton, "Robert Owen: Educator," The School Review 18, no. 3 (1910): 188-189. [27] Podmore, Robert Owen, 327. [28] Podmore, Robert Owen, 328-329. [29] Podmore, Robert Owen, 325. [30] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 95. [31] Josiah Warren, “From the March of Mind,” New Harmony Gazette, 10 September 1828, 365. [32] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 96. [33] Louis H. Everts, History of Clermont County, Ohio, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers, (New York: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1880), 344. [34] New York Tribune, 20 January 1846. [35] A. J. Macdonald, “Nashoba” in “A. J. Macdonald Writings on American Utopian Communities,” General Collection, (New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)., quoted in Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 66-67. [36] Macdonald, “Skaneateles Community”, Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 66-67. [37] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 69. [38] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 70-71. [39] Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 71. [40] Charles Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism, With a Forew. by W.J. Ghent and Reminiscences of Charles Sotheran, by A. Hyneman Sotheran, (New York: Michael Kennerly, 1915), 3. [41] Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism, 32. [42] Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism, 38. [43] Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism, 39. [44] Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism, 40. [45] Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism, 42-43. [46] Picture source: Albert Brisbane, Albert Brisbane, a Mental Biography; with a Character Study by His Wife, Redelia Brisbane, (Boston: Arena Pub., 1893). [47] Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism, 122. [48] Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism, 122. [49] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 33. [50] Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, Revised Fifth Edition, (New York, NY: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910), 79.; Albert Brisbane, Albert Brisbane, a Mental Biography; with a Character Study by His Wife, Redelia Brisbane, (Boston: Arena Pub., 1893), 49. [51] Safford E. North, Our County And Its People: a Descriptive And Biographical Record of Genesee County, New York, (Boston: Boston history company, 1899), 5. [52] Brisbane, Albert Brisbane: A Mental Biography, (Boston: Arena Publishing, 1895), 49. [53] Arthur E. Bestor Jr., “Albert Brisbane - Propagandist for Socialism in the 1840s,” New York History 28. no. 2. (April, 1947): 131. [54] Brisbane, Albert Brisbane: A Mental Biography, 54. [55] Brisbane, Albert Brisbane: A Mental Biography, 56. [56] Charles A. Madison, “Albert Brisbane: Social Dreamer,” The American Scholar 12, no. 3 (1943): 284. [57] Brisbane, Albert Brisbane: A Mental Biography, 71. [58] Brisbane, Albert Brisbane: A Mental Biography, 72. [59] Madison, Albert Brisbane, 285. [60] Madison, Albert Brisbane, 285. [61] Bestor, “Albert Brisbane - Propagandist,” 138 [62] Bestor, “Albert Brisbane - Propagandist,” 139. [63] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 32., Bestor, “Albert Brisbane - Propagandist,” 139. [64] Bestor, “Albert Brisbane - Propagandist,” 141. [65] Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 33. [66] Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism, 125. [67] Albert Brisbane, Association or A Concise Exposition of the Practical Part of Fourier’s Science, (New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1843), 8. [68] Brisbane, Association or A Concise Exposition of the Practical Part of Fourier’s Science, 8. [69] Clark, The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 33. [70] Clark, The Communitarian Moment, 31. [71] Clark, The Communitarian Moment, 32. [72] Clark, The Communitarian Moment, 32. [73] Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 107. [74] Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 108. [75] Arthur H. Estabrook, "The Family History of Robert Owen," Indiana Magazine of History 19, no. 1 (1923): 64. [76] Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 150-151. [77] Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 220. [78] Clark, The Communitarian Moment, 35. [79] William Lloyd Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison on Non-Resistance, Together with a Personal Sketch by His Daughter, Fanny Garrison Villard, and a Tribute by Leo Tolstoi, (New York: The Nation Press printing Co., 1924), 30. [80] Clark, The Communitarian Moment, 40. [81] Clark, The Communitarian Moment, 40. [82] Clark, The Communitarian Moment, 40. [83] Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 20. [84] Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States: From Personal Visits and Observation, (New York: Hillary House Publishers, 1960), 260. [85] Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., Backwoods Utopias: the sectarian and Owenite phases of communitarian socialism in America,1663-1829, (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1950), 1. [86] Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, 1. [87] John Humphrey Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1870), 26. [88] Noyes, A History of American Socialisms, 26. [89] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Nelly Rumyantseva, Marx and Engels on the United States, (Moscow: Progress, 1979), 33. [90] Frederick Engles, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling, (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 32. [91] Engels, Socialism, 43. [92] Adam-Max Tuchinsky, ""The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever": The "New-York Tribune", the 1848 French Revolution, and American Social Democratic Discourse," Journal of American History 92, no. 2 (2005): 491. [93] Tuchinsky, “‘The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever,’” 493. [94] Tuchinsky, “‘The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever,’” 490. [95] Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Daguerreotype collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c10182 permission: PD [96] Tuchinsky, “‘The Bourgeoisie Will Fall and Fall Forever,’” 491. [97] Marx, On America and the Civil War, xx. [98] Marx and Engles, Marx and Engles on the United States, 169. [99] Karl Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer: Pioneer of American Socialism, (New York: International Publishers, 1947), 11. [100] Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer, 15. [101] Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer, 31. [102] Obermann, Joseph Weydemeyer, 118. [103] Stone, “August Willich,” 539. [104] Joseph George, “‘Black Flag Warfare’: Lincoln and the Raids against Richmond and Jefferson Davis,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 115, 3 (1991): 292. [105] Stone, “August Willich,” 539. [106] Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Dona Torr, Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895: With Commentary and Notes, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1943), 27. [107] Marx, Marx on America and the Civil War, xiv. [108] Kevin B. Anderson, “Marx’s Intertwining of Race and Class during the Civil War in the United States,” Journal of Classical Sociology 17, no. 1 (February 2017), 30. [109] Anderson, “Marx’s Intertwining of Race and Class during the Civil War in the United States,” 30. [110] James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 28. [111] W. E. B. Dubois, “Application for membership in the Communist Party,” CPUSA, http://www.cpusa.org/party_info/application-to-join-the-cpusa-by-w-e-b-du-bois-1961/ Accessed 14 August 2017. [112] Raj Patel, “Martin Luther King Jr’s radicalism muted by MLK archives' corporate sponsors,” International Journal of Socialist Review, http://links.org.au/node/3674 Accessed 14 August 2017. [113] Robert F. Williams, Negroes With Guns, (New York: Martino Fine Books, 2013), 63. [114] Williams, Negroes With Guns, 64. [115] Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1.4, 1999, 22-23. AuthorMitchell K. Jones is a historian and activist from Rochester, NY. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history from the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He has written on utopian socialism in the antebellum United States. His research interests include early America, communal societies, antebellum reform movements, religious sects, working class institutions, labor history, abolitionism and the American Civil War. His master’s thesis, entitled “Hunting for Harmony: The Skaneateles Community and Communitism in Upstate New York: 1825-1853” examines the radical abolitionist John Anderson Collins and his utopian project in Upstate New York. Jones is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Archives June 2021 5/24/2021 American Socialism Travels: Lessons From the Shakers of New Lebanon. By: Mitchell K. JonesRead Now United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, known colloquially as Shakers, arrived in North America in 1774. Their founder, Mother Ann Lee, began agitating for a renunciation of sin and celibacy in the 1760s, which landed her in prison. In 1770, while in prison, she had visions telling her to lead a spiritual movement renouncing lust and the sin that it influenced. Shaker leaders posthumously announced she was the female reincarnation of Jesus Christ. After the English Revolution, heretical doctrines like hers encouraged severe and violent persecution. After a series of incidents where Congregationalists attacked Shakers, who they called heretics, they fled England. The Shakers successfully built the first self-consciously communal villages in the New World. Shaker communes established a foundation for socialism in America. The Shakers practiced community of property, complete celibacy and separate but equal segregation of the genders. By the early 19th century, they chose New Lebanon in Upstate New York for their headquarters.[1] By the mid-19th century, other religious groups, inspired by the Shakers’ success, including the Icarians, the Zoarites, the Amana Society Inspirationists and the Rappite Harmonists also fled Europe and started their own communes in the United States.  In a piece entitled “Description Of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence,” first published in the German newspaper Deutsches Bürgerbuch für in 1845, Karl Marx’s comrade and writing partner Frederich Engels cheered these utopian experiments in America, writing, “For communism, social existence and activity based on community of goods, is not only possible but has actually already been realised in many communities in America and in one place in England, with the greatest success, as we shall see.”[2]  Shaker Elders Daniel Offord and Brother Levi Shaw demonstrating advanced yard care technology: scythe and lawn mower, Mount Lebanon, NY, 1854 postcard Engels went on to describe what he knew of the Shaker community at New Lebanon: Another colony of Shakers, New Lebanon in the State of New York, was visited by a second English traveller, by the name of Pitkeithly, in the year 1842. Mr. Pitkeithly most thoroughly inspected the whole town, which numbers some eight hundred inhabitants and owns between seven and eight thousand acres of land, he examined its workshops and factories, its tanneries, sawmills and so on, and declares the whole arrangement to be perfect. He too is surprised at the wealth of these people who began with nothing and are now becoming richer with each passing year, and he says: They are happy and gay among themselves; there is no quarrelling but on the contrary friendliness and love prevail throughout their habitation, in every part of which reigns an orderliness and regularity which have not their equal. ...As we said, they enjoy complete community of goods and have ten such communities in the United States of North America.[3]  There is still an open-air Shaker museum at the Mount Lebanon site. My wife and I decided to make the trip up to New Lebanon on a pleasant late May day. It was about a four hour drive from our home in Rochester. We remarked at the beauty of the Hudson Valley as we glided along above it all. When we reached the Shaker Community at New Lebanon it was quiet, although there were several cars parked in various places. We explored the buildings in the self-guided tour. There are brochures available on one of the buildings that guide the visitor through the historic community. Admission to the village is free all year, although the buildings are not open. It is now the grounds of the Darrow School, a private, college-prep, boarding school. The Darrow School campus and dormitories have been closed due to COVID-19, another example of how, like the outbreak of Typhus at the Sodus Bay Phalanx, pandemic and epidemic diseases can be extremely dangerous in congregate living settings. The idea of a private school is not entirely beyond the pale for Shaker theology. Shakers spurned the state. Engels wrote of their attitude toward the law: In their ten towns there is not a single gendarme or police officer, no judge, lawyer or soldier, no prison or penitentiary; and yet there is proper order in all their affairs. The laws of the land are not for them and as far as they are concerned could just as well be abolished and nobody would notice any difference for they are the most peaceable citizens and have never yielded a single criminal for the prisons.[4]  Shaker Schoolhouse, Shaker Road, New Lebanon, Historic American Buildings Survey, William F. Winter, Jr., Photographer August 1931 John 15:19 says, “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.” The Shakers’ experiences in Europe made this bible verse really resonate with them. They distrusted state institutions, which led them to create their own alternative institutions. The Shakers set up their own school system in New Lebanon in 1815. They based their system on the cutting-edge Lancasterian system. British educator Joseph Lancaster recommended the classroom be a… parallelogram, the length about twice the width. The windows were to be six feet from the floor. The floor should be inclined, rising one foot in twenty from the master's desk to the upper end of the room, where the highest class is situated. The master's desk is on the middle of a platform two to three feet high, erected at the lower end of the room. Forms and desks, fixed firmly to the ground, occupy the middle of the room, a passage being left between the ends of the forms and the wall, five or six feet broad, where the children form semicircles for reading. Boys attended school in the winter, while girls attended in the summer after Father Meacham and Mother Wright’s direction for gender segregation. In 1817, the Shaker school at New Lebanon was declared a public school by the state of New York.[5] Despite the cutting edge vision of the Darrow School’s educational system and the Shakers' reluctance to work with the state, Shakers still would have spurned education for pay. The fact that they agreed to cooperate with New York State in making the New Lebanon school a public school indicates that Shakers of the past might have questioned the operation of a private prep school on their domain. Shakers were known for their herbal home remedies and selling seeds to grow medicinal herbs My wife and I were both thoroughly impressed by the Shaker architecture. Many of the buildings have additions that appear as though a hole was cut in the wall and an appendage grafted onto the opening. It is as though the Shaker council met and determined they needed more space, engineered the best way to create more indoor space out of what they had and then collectively worked together to make it happen.  The stone barn at New Lebanon is one of the most awe inspiring achievements of Shaker engineering and collective construction on display. It is thoroughly impressive to stand inside. It is also inspiring to know that people worked in this barn for the collective good of the whole group. Engels hailed the Shakers as founders of modern communism, writing, “The first people to set up a society on the basis of community of goods in America, indeed in the whole world, were the so-called Shakers. These people are a distinct sect who have the strangest religious beliefs, do not marry and allow no intercourse between the sexes, and these are not their only peculiarities of this kind.”[6] He explained the defiant history of the Shakers and their triumph in the United States: The sect of the Shakers originated some seventy years ago. Its founders were poor people who united in order to live together in brotherly love and community of goods and to worship their God in their own way. Although their religious views and particularly the prohibition on marriage deterred many, they nevertheless attracted support and now have ten large communities, each of which is between three and eight hundred members strong. Each of these communities is a fine, well laid-out town, with dwelling houses, factories, ÷4 workshops, assembly buildings and barns; they have flower and vegetable gardens, fruit trees, woods, vineyards, meadows and arable land in abundance; then, livestock of all kinds, horses and beef-cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry, in excess of their needs, and of the very best breeds. Their granaries are always full of corn, their store-rooms full of clothing materials, so that an English traveller who visited them said he could not understand why these people still worked, when after all they possessed an abundance of everything; unless it was that they worked simply as a pastime, having nothing else to do. Amongst these people no one is obliged to work against his will, and no one seeks work in vain. They have no poor-houses and infirmaries, having not a single person poor and destitute, nor any abandoned widows and orphans; all their needs are met and they need fear no want…. They enjoy, as we said, the most absolute community of goods and have no trade and no money among themselves.[7] The Shakers were celibate separatists with peculiar religious views, according to Engels, but they had somehow achieved something remarkable. They were able to establish successful communism in living, something that no other sect before them had done.  The Shakers built their first meetinghouse on Mount Lebanon, also known as New Lebanon, in the town of Canaan, NY in 1785. The biblical land of Canaan was the promised land to the Israelites after they escaped from slavery in Egypt. Today, the idea that God promised the land of Canaan at Mount Zion to the Israelites is the basis for Zionism, a religious ideology that justifies oppression of Palestinian Arabs. However, for Shakers, it represented their escape from slavery to orthodox religion. For them, Canaan, NY was the promised land. Ironically, there is an obvious analogy in relation to settler colonialism between the Palestinian situation today and the situation of the people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in the late 18th century.  Shaker gift drawing by Sister Sarah Bates of Mount Lebanon, NY, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Spiritual visions or "gifts" inspired Shaker art.[8] Even before communitarian immigrants like the Shakers and the Amana Society came from Europe, the native peoples of upstate New York were living in a form of primary communism. Pioneer anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, based in Rochester, NY, was the first to identify the way of life of the indigenous Haudenosaunee people of Western New York as “primitive communism.” Later, Socialists such as Sam Marcy, Buffalo, NY based founder of the Communist Workers’ World Party would use the less pejorative term “primary communism.” Marcy wrote in 1992, “Lewis Henry Morgan's writings on the communal life of the Iroquois in North America confirmed what the socialist movement in Europe had deduced about early societies elsewhere before written history: that there was a universal period when property was communal, there was no state, and the products of human labor were shared equitably.”[9] The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of what is now Western New York were some of the first communists in North America. Although their way of life was crushed by European settlement, they inspired settler communities that would come later.  "Siege on the Iroquois Village" by Samuel de Champlain from his book Les voyages du Sieur de Champlain Xaintongeois, capitain ordinaire pour le Roy en la marine… circa 1615-1618[10] and The city of passageways and housing units of Charles Fourier’s ‘garantiste’ city by André.[11] The indigenous Haudenosaunee or Iroquois nation organized their society on a kinship-based form of socialism. According to Morgan, the Iroquois practiced “communism in living” for centuries.[12] Iroquois society planned for and met the needs of each individual. Extended families lived communally in large longhouses and shared everything. They organized inter-communal trade networks based on reciprocity. In 1881, Morgan wrote, “Among the Iroquois hospitality was an established usage. If a man entered an Indian house in any of their villages, whether a villager, a tribesman, or a stranger, it was the duty of the women therein to set food before him. An omission to do this would have been a discourtesy amounting to an affront. If hungry, he ate; if not hungry, courtesy required that he should taste the food and thank the giver. This would be repeated at every house he entered, and at whatever hour in the day.”[13] Hospitality and harmony were key values in Iroquois society. By the 18th century, their primary communist system inspired settlers from Europe who came to the New World seeking refuge from religious persecution. Groups like the Shakers saw the Haudenosaunee as fellow travelers. Throughout the early 19th century, Shakers had visions of native spirits.[14] While their possession rituals often amounted to what some today might consider racist stereotypes and melodramatic pageantry, they were remarkable as reflections of the Shaker’s aspirations. They admired and wanted to live like native people. Historian Erik Seeman argues, “[N]ative spirits offered Shakers a sense of group identity through ‘collective responsibility’ for past injustices and the ‘possibility of redemption’ by acknowledging such historical misdeeds.”[15] They attempted to atone for the original American sin of settler colonialism by building a social order they hoped was in harmony with that of the Iroquois. The Shakers were among the first white Americans to aspire to live up to the communitarian call of the Haudenosaunee region. This fir tree and carriage house in New Lebanon have looked much the same for hundreds of years The biblical Canaan was located in the fertile valley below Mount Lebanon. Lebanon means white in Hebrew and, according to the bible, the mountain was named that because it was covered in snow.[16] In the bible, Lebanon was known for its cedar and cypress trees.[17] Cedar wood from Mount Lebanon was used in the building of the second temple in Jerusalem.[18] The beauty of the region reminded the Shakers of the biblical promised land of Canaan and their own exodus from persecution in Europe, so they decided to settle there. Shakers were not the only religious people that found inspiration in the hills and valleys surrounding New Lebanon, NY. According to a sign posted in the inspirational grotto next to the Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception in New Lebanon: In 1858, in the grotto of Massabielle, near Lourdes in southern France, Our Lady appeared eighteen times to Bernadette Soubirous, a young peasant girl. She revealed herself as the Immaculate Conception, asked that a chapel be built on the site of the vision, and told the girl to drink from a fountain in the grotto. No fountain was to be seen, but when Bernadette dug at a spot designated by the apparition, a spring began to flow. The water from this still flowing spring has shown remarkable healing power, though it contains no curative property that science can identify. Lourdes has become the most famous modern shrine of Our Lady.  The church also runs a food pantry, known as Charlie’s Pantry, for the poor and needy on the grounds. According to the church’s website: We are a community of believers who are grateful for our diversity and mindful of our unity in Christ. Our lives are based on faith, hope and charity through the outpouring of the Spirit, nourished by the Eucharist. Catholics, as the religion of Italian, Irish, Spanish and Latino immigrants, have long been the victims of discrimination. It is good to know that in this place where historically so much material good has been done in the name of Jesus Christ, even the Catholics are inspired to communitarian call. The Mount Lebanon Shaker Society was home to Shaker pioneers Father Joseph Meacham and Mother Lucy Wright. Mother Ann Lee died in 1784, leaving Fr. Meacham in charge. He called Sister Wright to Lebanon from a community in Pittsfield, MA. Shaker historian Sister Flo Morse describes the arrangement, “Father Joseph chose a woman, Sister Lucy Wright of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to be the ‘leading character in the female line’ and set the pattern for a dual order of government with equality of the sexes far in advance of the times.”[21] New Lebanon became a center of leadership for the Shaker religion. Morse continues, “Father Joseph and Mother Lucy made their headquarters at New Lebanon, and the New York community became the mother church. It was the first to collect its members into the way of life the Shakers called ‘society-order.’”[22] From there the Shakers put out the call to build communal dwellings and prepare for converts to arrive. Mount Lebanon was the model for communism in living not only for other Shakers, but for religious sects and radicals throughout the antebellum era. For a time the Shakers’ increased their membership dramatically, riding on the crest of the Second Great Awakening revival movement in mid-19 century Upstate New York. However, ultimately their prohibition on sex discouraged new members and prevented current members from having children of their own. The communal way of life became less attractive to pious Americans as the economy shifted post-industrial revolution.  Early 1900s postcard from New Lebanon, NY Engels concluded his review of the religious communists in America by remarking on their influence on the socialist movement that was developing at the time: The success enjoyed by the Shakers, Harmonists and Separatists, and also the general urge for a new order in human society and the efforts of the Socialists and Communists that this has given rise to, have caused many other people in America to undertake similar experiments in recent years. Thus Herr Ginal, a German minister in Philadelphia, has founded a society which has bought 37,000 acres of forest in the State of Philadelphia, built more than 80 houses there and already settled some five hundred people, mostly Germans, there. They have a large tannery and pottery, many workshops and storehouses, and they are really thriving. It goes without saying that they live in community of goods, as is the case with all the following examples. A Mr. Hizby, an ironmaster of Pittsburg (Ohio) has set up in his native town a similar society which last year bought some 4,000 acres of land in the vicinity of the town and is planning to establish a settlement there based on community of goods —In addition there is a similar settlement in the State of New York at Skaneateles which was founded by J. A. Collins, an English Socialist, in the spring of 1843* with thirty members; then at Minden in the State of Massachusetts, where about a hundred people have been settled since 1842; then two in Pike County in the State of Pennsylvania, which were also recently set up; then one at Brook Farm, Massachusetts, where fifty members and thirty pupils live on about two hundred acres and have set up an excellent school under the leadership of the Unitarian minister G. Ripley ; and then one at Northampton in the same State, which has been in existence since 1842 and provides work for one hundred and twenty members on five hundred acres of land, in arable and livestock farming as well as in sawmills, silk-mills and dyeing, and finally a colony of emigrant English Socialists at Equality near Milwaukee in the State of Wisconsin, which was started last year by Thomas Hunt and is making rapid progress. Apart from these, several other communities are said to have been founded recently, but there is as yet no news of them .-This much is however certain: the Americans, and particularly the poor workers in the large towns of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, etc., have taken the matter to their hearts and founded a large number of societies for the establishment of such colonies, and all the time new communities are being set up. The Americans are tired of continuing as the slaves of the few rich men who feed on the labour of the people; and it is obvious that with the great energy and endurance of this nation, community of goods will soon be introduced over a significant part of their country.[23] As I stood in awe of the triumph of collective architectural, engineering and constructive endeavors that is the stone barn at New Lebanon, I could not help but say a silent prayer of thanks to the Shakers for their example of communism in living and gender equality that was so ahead of its time. Many Americans today erroneously believe that socialism and communism are ideas wholly foreign to Americanism. They believe that the basis of communism was formed by European philosophers who were out of touch with the American creed. The truth, however, is that socialism in America is not only as old, but older than the American nation itself. In no other region is this more clearly demonstrated than in Upstate New York. Works Cited [1] Flo Morse, The Story of the Shakers, (Woodstock, VT: The Countryman Press, 1986), 17. [2] Friedrich Engels and Nelly Rumyantseva, Marx and Engels on the United States, (Moscow: Progress, 1979), 33. [3] Engels, Marx and Engels on the United States, 36. [4] Engels, Marx and Engels on the United States, 34. [5] Isaac N. Youngs, “Concise View of the Church of God,” Winterthur Museum Library, Andrews Shaker Collection ms. 861, 355, 366–74. [6] Engels, Marx and Engels on the United States, 34. [7] Engels, Marx and Engels on the United States, 34. [8] Picture source: “From a Spirit Communication, an Iconic Logo Emerges: How a Shaker Gift Drawing Inspired CBS,” Shaker Museum Mount Lebanon, May 9, 2018, https://shakerml.org/from-a-spirit-communication-an-iconic-logo-emerges-how-a-shaker-gift-drawing-inspired-cbs/. [9] Sam Marcy, “Utopian Socialist Experiments.” Soviet Socialism: Utopian or Scientific - Utopian socialist experiments, Accessed October 30, 2019, https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/sovietsocialism/sovsoc1.html. [10] Samuel de Champlain, “Siege of the Iroquois Village. - Cornell University Library Digital Collections,” Cornell University Library Digital Collections: Images from the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections, Accessed November 19, 2019, https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/ss:574092. [11] Hubert-Jan Henley and Hilde Heynen, Back from Utopia: the Challenge of the Modern Movement, (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2002), 281. [12] Morgan, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines, 44. [13] Lewis Henry Morgan, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1881), 45. [14] Erik R. Seeman, “Native Spirits, Shaker Visions,” Journal of the Early Republic 35 no. 3 (2015): 347. [15] Seeman, “Native Spirits, Shaker Visions,” 350. [16] Jer 18:14 [17] Judg 9:15 [18] 1 Ki 5:6; 7:2 [19] “Immaculate Conception Church; Saint Joseph's Church,” Immaculate Conception; Saint Joseph's: New Lebanon, Accessed May 23, 2021, https://parishes.rcda.org/ImmaculateConception&StJosephs/shrine.php. [20] “Immaculate Conception Church; Saint Joseph's Church.” Immaculate Conception; Saint Joseph's: New Lebanon, Accessed May 23, 2021, https://parishes.rcda.org/ImmaculateConception&StJosephs/ [21] Morse, Story of the Shakers, 17. [22] Morse, Story of the Shakers, 18. [23] Engels, Marx and Engels on the United States, 41 AuthorMitchell K. Jones is a historian and activist from Rochester, NY. He has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a master’s degree in history from the College at Brockport, State University of New York. He has written on utopian socialism in the antebellum United States. His research interests include early America, communal societies, antebellum reform movements, religious sects, working class institutions, labor history, abolitionism and the American Civil War. His master’s thesis, entitled “Hunting for Harmony: The Skaneateles Community and Communitism in Upstate New York: 1825-1853” examines the radical abolitionist John Anderson Collins and his utopian project in Upstate New York. Jones is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Archives May 2021 |
Archives
December 2024
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed