America's Communal Utopias: The New Moral World of Robert Owen and New Harmony (PDF)

The New Moral World of Robert Owen and New Harmony DONALD E. PITZER The firs...

The New Moral World of Robert Owen and New Harmony DONALD E. PITZER The first issue of The New-Harmony Gazette appeared in America’s earliest socialistic Utopian community on October 1, 1825.1 It featured not only founder Robert Owen’s introductory address and “The Constitution of the Preliminary Society of New Harmony” but also “Song No. 1” for the children. Ah, soon will come the glorious day, Inscribed on Mercy’s brow, When truth shall rend the veil away That blinds the nations now. When earth no more in anxious fear And misery shall sigh: And pain shall cease, and every tear Be wiped from every eye. The race of man shall wisdom learn, And error cease to reign: The charms of innocence return, And all be new again. The fount of life will then be quaffed In peace by all that come; And every wind that blows shall waft Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. Some wandering mortal home.2 Gazette coeditor William Pelham wrote and printed these simple, millennial-sounding lines for a purpose. When sung to the familiar tune of “Auld Lang Syne” they were to rivet in the minds of the rising generation the benefits to come in Robert Owen’s vision of the New Moral World: peace and plenty, truth and happiness.3 Every Owenite in New Harmony believed the new social order could be realized by creating a superior character in each individual from birth and that the means were readily available to human hands. Loving care and a liberal education within the protective environment of socialistic communities of equality would lead inevitably to rational mental independence and universal human bliss. Robert Owen’s own character was molded as the sixth of seven children in a working-class family in Newtown, Wales.4 He was born on May 14, 1771, just five years before Britain’s America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  American colonies dared revolt against King George III in the name of “the pursuit of happiness,” which became the ultimate objective of Owen’s own Utopian crusade. His mother was a farmer’s daughter. His father was variously an ironmonger, saddler, storekeeper, and postal worker. Like most poor children caught in the early social distress of the Industrial Revolution, the young Owen faced but two options after his tenth birthday. He could enter the factory labor force or seek an apprenticeship. At ten he ended his formal education and moved to London, where his brother helped him become the apprentice of Mr. McGuffog, a prominent Scottish clothing fabric and dry goods merchant in Stamford, England. McGuffog’s home and store gave direction to the thought and career of his apprentice. By his own testimony, Owen received kind treatment and averaged five hours a day reading books from his master’s library.5 During this time he gradually relinquished the Christian faith he had learned at home. In its place came a rational and eclectic approach to ethics and morality with an abiding skepticism of the motives and doctrines of organized religion. After 1817, when Owen the social reformer began expressing these unorthodox views in public attacks on the abuses of the clergy and the injustices of marriage as tied to religion, he discovered this drew far more criticism, and did more damage to his appeal, than all his radical economic theories and community-building schemes. In America he was widely castigated after using his speech in New Harmony on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, to make his own “Declaration of Mental Independence.” He praised the American Revolution as the first opportunity to use political power to attack the “Trinity” of evils: “PRIVATE, OR INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY—ABSURD AND IRRATIONAL SYSTEMS OF RELIGION—AND MARRIAGE, FOUNDED ON INDIVIDUAL PROPERTY COMBINED WITH SOME ONE OF THESE IRRATIONAL SYSTEMS OF RELIGION.”6 Many unfairly branded him and his movement atheistic. Yet Owen, like other rationalists of his time, reasoned “that there is an external or an internal cause of all existences, by the fact of their existence; [and] that this all-pervading cause of motion and change in the universe, is that Incomprehensible Power, which the nations of the world have called God.”7 Eventually Owen proposed a universal “Rational Religion” within a Rational System of Society based on the idea that “truth is nature, and nature God; that God is truth, and truth is God.”8 Just as machines and steam power were revolutionizing textile manufacturing, Owen left McGuffog’s store in about 1787 with a thorough knowledge of textiles and their market Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. potential. Then he went off to seek his fortune in Manchester, the center of England’s emerging textile industry. The very industrial system from which he would acquire his wealth was also creating the social degradation that later touched his heart and fueled his social reform movement. Both Owen and his socialist contemporary in Paris, Charles Fourier, attributed the increasingly aggravated problems of society to both industrialization and the French Revolution. Coincidentally in 1774, just over a decade before Owen’s arrival in Manchester, Ann Lee had escaped this same city’s dehumanizing factories and religious constraints by emigrating to America with her small band of adventist Shakers. By 1816, when Owen first learned of the successful communal settlements of her religious movement, he had already used the factory town of New Lanark, Scotland, as the initial model for his projected ideal communities. Nevertheless, after he satisfied himself that the Shakers were achieving goals he America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  prized (such as social discipline, breaking down family ties to serve the common good, and becoming self-sufficient through agriculture and high-quality handicrafts and fair dealing), in 1817 he gladly began to point to Shaker villages as proof that communal organization could mold character and solve basic economic and social problems.9 By his twentieth birthday the young capitalist of Manchester had turned borrowed money into a spinning machinery business and already managed the large Chorlton Twist Company. Then, in 1799, Owen made the decision that set the future course of his business and reform careers. With Manchester partners, he purchased the famous cotton-spinning mills of David Dale at New Lanark, Scotland, and assumed its management. Dale and Richard Arkwright, inventor of the water frame spinning machine, took advantage of the water power below the Falls of Clyde about midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh to complete the first massive stone mill in 1785 that grew into one of Britain’s largest cotton manufacturing villages. Dale attracted 1,500 workers to this remote factory town in the scenic but narrowly confining valley of the Clyde River by adding row houses and schools. In this company town Owen discovered a bride, an industrial fortune, and a ready-made laboratory for his social experiments. His hopes for both business profits and the eventual realization of the New Moral World rested on effective social controls and character formation. The New Lanark labor community itself, as a model factory town, provided the prototype for the decision he announced in 1816 to make the building of planned communities a means for implementing his campaign on behalf of the poor and working classes. He further explained that creating whole communities could also benefit the middle and upper classes, not only of Britain and the United States but of the entire world. British Owenite historian John F. C. Harrison has concluded that “the model factory was the germ of Owen’s communitarian- ism.” In fact, he raises the question of “whether Owen would have become a communitarian [at all] had he not been a cotton spinner.” In any case, Harrison finds it clear that “the idea of the factory colony or community was closely associated with the early machine textile industry, which not only pioneered the technological changes of the first Industrial Revolution but also developed new forms of social organization.”10 Yet the impossible burden that the task of building entire new communities would lay on Owen’s social reform movement seems only to have dawned on him years later as one after another proved unworkable. In the 1810s and early 1820s, however, his growing familiarity with the flourishing communities of the Shaker, Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. Harmonist, and Moravian movements in America further convinced him to pursue the elaborate communal method. The year in which Robert Owen purchased David Dale’s spinning mills he also married Dale’s daughter, Ann Caroline. Contrary to his own growing animosity to established religion, which he equated with oppressive superstition, Owen discovered his wife steeped in her father’s Protestant fundamentalism and millennialism. He disdained the belief in the second coming of Christ to effect a better world that so possessed his wife and much of the churchgoing public in Britain. Yet after 1817 he incorporated a secular form of millennialism into his own reform propaganda and often quoted biblical passages to reinforce his arguments.11 During his entire career he seems never to have missed an opportunity to turn an idea that had caught the popular imagination into a reason to believe in the truth of his own America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  crusade, from millennialism and spiritualism to phrenology. Ann and Robert grew apart over religious and other matters. Their separation became complete when, in midlife, Robert left for America in 1824 to begin the community-building phase of his Utopian ventures. The reformer did not even attend Ann’s funeral in 1831 although he was in England when she died. However, at least five of their eight children actively embraced their father’s visionary humanitarianism. These capable individuals filled a particularly vital place as loyal practitioners and articulate exponents of their father’s ideas in America. William Owen accompanied his father to New Harmony in 1824. Although only twenty-two years old, he and Owen’s Scottish disciple Donald Macdonald became the initial managers of this first Owenite community while the elder Owen took a propagandizing tour. Eldest son Robert Dale Owen arrived in New Harmony in January 1826 with Philadelphia scientists and educators aboard the keelboat his father dubbed the “Boatload of Knowledge.” David Dale Owen and Richard Owen came in January 1828, and their sister Jane Dale Owen arrived in 1833 after her mother’s death. This involvement of Owen’s children is of special importance. Owen and the Owenite communities of the 1820s came upon the American scene too early to receive the direct support that the leaders and organizations of the liberal political, labor, and social reform movements born in the Jacksonian era sometimes gave to the Fourierists and other communitarian socialists in the 1840s. Owen’s own family members extended the effective life of Owenism in America by the developmental process of translating their father’s Utopian dreams into the crusades for women’s rights, birth control, tax-supported public schools, and freedom for the slaves after the first wave of Owenite energy for community building abated in 1829. In pursuit of the industrial fortune that made him one of Britain’s wealthiest entrepreneurs by the 1810s, Owen became captivated by the idea of a science of society. His interest was driven by a desire akin to that of other contemporary milltown managers and owners, a good number of whom initiated projects for improvement among their own mill workers. Owen knew that factory production and village management depended on the health, well-being, and discipline of his poor villagers. In 1811 they numbered 2,206, of whom 1,360, mostly women and children, worked in the mills.12 Thus he was drawn to methods promising social and behavioral control within the context of a community of workers about whose physical care and intellectual and cultural improvement he felt genuine concern. Determined to maximize his Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. control while ensuring a contented, efficient workforce, Owen invented a “silent monitor,” started an infant school, and opened his Institution for the Formation of Character. The monitor, a three-inch block of wood painted a different color on each side—black, blue, yellow and white—hung by each work station in the mills for Owen and all to see. The color on display indicated each employee’s performance the previous day as rated by a foreman and recorded in a “book of character.”13 America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  This engraving of Matilda Heming’s drawing of Robert Owen, published in December 1823, captures the vigorous young manager of the New Lanark mills on the eve of his Utopian venture in communal living at New Harmony, Indiana. (From John F. C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World ; original in the Robert Owen Museum, Newton, Wales.) Owen came to view education as central to socialization. He extended David Dale’s earlier schools for children ages six to ten downward to include infants and upward to provide lifelong learning for adults. After 1809, for a small fee, parents could place children as young as one year old in the new infant school. This not only freed mothers for the factory like modern day-care centers, but it also contributed to Owen’s larger purpose of replacing initial negative family influence with a positive environment for instilling desired values and fashioning superior character. In effect, the infant school permitted the community to replace Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. the family in matters of personal development and social control. The pioneering techniques Owen conceived for his infant and day schools soon aroused wide interest. Thousands of visitors from Europe and America inspected them. Nearly three decades before Friedrich Froebel began his kindergarten for German youngsters, Owen insisted that loving kindness with no contrived rewards or punishments permeate the New Lanark school system. After 1813 Owen’s new London partners, especially Quaker philanthropist William Allen and well-known utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, insisted on introducing the popular method of Englishman Joseph Lancaster that held promise of literacy and knowledge for all. As used in New Lanark and as far away as the Shaker and Harmonist communities in America, this Lancastrian system simply designated students as monitors to teach other students what they themselves had learned by rote. However, Owen refused to let instruction dominate. Instead, he wanted textbooks used sparingly. Students learned mostly by doing, in a style akin to that America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  used in the school of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in Switzerland. Pestalozzi’s approach to education appealed greatly to both Owen and William Madure, the wealthy Scot dry goods merchant turned geologist and social reformer whom Owen later attracted as his philanthropic financial partner in the purchase of New Harmony. Owen sent all four of his own sons to the progressive school of Philip Emanuel von Fellenberg in Hofwyl, Switzerland. Maclure funded Pestalozzian schools in Paris, Spain, and Philadelphia before he and his protégée, Marie Fretageot, assumed responsibility for the Pestalozzian schools in New Harmony. Children in both New Lanark and New Harmony learned through play, conversation, singing, dancing, and military-style marching. The playground took on as much importance as the classroom. Huge maps and giant pictures of animals graced the walls of one room in the New Lanark school where geography was taught by a game. Owen required teachers to consider the needs and maturation levels of their charges and to tailor their methods accordingly.14 The New Lanark educational system was complete when Owen opened his Institution for the Formation of Character in 1816. The name itself boldly proclaimed the comprehensive purpose of his entire program of education. This single institution combined under one roof his infant and day schools and introduced educational, social, and cultural activities for adults. Lectures, discussions, and debates treated subjects from natural science to ancient history. Now the older residents became part of the captive audience in Owen’s company town. Every event designed for them lent itself to adult education, recreation, or indoctrination in Owen’s emerging Utopian theories. When the effectiveness of these methods of social control became apparent, Robert Owen gained a reputation for efficient, benevolent factory management. He soon distinguished himself beyond his fellow industrialists, even the socially conscious ones such as David Dale who tried similar progressive policies regarding wages, working hours, and education. Owen’s keen sensitivity to the plight of poor workers injected a moral dimension into his thinking about poverty and riches existing side by side in the industrial age. He recognized and freely admitted that the increase of wealth in society as well as for himself during the Napoleonic era was not created by his or others’ advanced managerial skills, but rather by the productivity of new machinery. He argued that if human beings were organized and serviced as carefully as the machines they operated, all employers would profit. But regardless of their profit or loss, standing as he did in the liberal vanguard as a socialist (a term coined by Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. London Owenites in 1827),15 Owen accepted the social responsibility of owners and managers to the working classes. His willingness to criticize selfishness itself placed him outside the circle of other cotton spinners and beyond the ideas of classical economists such as Adam Smith. It placed him closer to the socialist economic theories of David Ricardo. Owen also broke out of the mold of other business leaders when, beginning in 1812, he became a public propagandist for Utopian radicalism. His speeches and writings were aimed initially at securing like-minded New Lanark partners and labor legislation, then developed into vehicles for finding philanthropic industrialists like himself to erect model industrial villages for both social improvement and personal profit.16 Equal to Owen’s benevolence ranked his aggressive paternalism that aroused conflicts in New Lanark and New Harmony. In New Lanark he instituted curfews, random body searches to America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  prevent theft, and fines for drunkenness or for having children out of wedlock. He established committees for house inspections somewhat like Henry Ford did much later in Detroit. Enraged women who called these inspectors the “Bug Hunters” and “military police” often refused to open their doors. Although Owen cast himself in the role of chief advocate for the interests of the masses, he never considered them his equal. He spoke with condescending certainty about the brutal ignorance and stupidity of the common people and equated the need to make them happy with the desire to make them docile.17 In 1816, the year after he announced that community building rather than legislation would be the preferred method for his social movement, he firmly asserted that he did not wish “to have the opinions of the ill-trained and uninformed on any of the measures intended for their relief and amelioration. No! On such subjects, until they shall be instructed in better habits, and made rationally intelligent, their advice can be of no value.”18 In New Harmony he unwittingly helped sink his flagship project of communitarian socialism by finding it all too easy to regard the majority of its 800 to 900 American farmer and mechanic volunteers as he had the poor, submissive residents of his milltown in Scotland. On April 27, 1825, he officially opened New Harmony for community life to all who would accept his generous offer to make it their home on an economic arrangement yet to be determined. But he bluntly announced to those gathered in the former Harmonist brick church that “as no other individual has had the same experience as myself in the practice of the system about to be introduced, I must for some time, partially take the lead in its direction.”19 Reflecting on the grave difficulties a manager turned philanthropist confronted in administrating a community filled mostly with a random lot of freedom-loving, backwoods Americans, his partner, Maclure, later observed that Owen had failed to recognize that “the materials in this country are not the same as the cotton spinners at New Lanark, nor does the advice of a patron go so far.”20 As events later proved, even in liberal New Harmony Owen’s nagging paternalistic bent and entrepreneurial orientation, along with the irritations produced by trying to mix the community’s lower and upper classes, blocked any complete implementation of the egalitarianism and community of property that he at times advocated after 1824. Neither he nor his wealthy partner found it in their nature to turn over their New Harmony property to the otherwise communitarian citizenry any more than Owen would have given his milltown to the laborers of New Lanark. Thus, in accord with Owen’s earliest Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. community plans, New Harmony can be described best as a philanthropic project of two Scottish businessmen turned social reformers. However, in Owen’s broader scheme for worldwide reform, New Harmony represented merely a temporary springboard to the entirely new towns he proposed. These were to be built on a grand scale according to designs he had engraved and printed as early as 1817.21 By 1825 he had a six-foot-square architectural model displayed in New York, in Rembrandt Peak’s museum in Philadelphia, and in the White House, where John Quincy Adams was president.22 In Robert Owen’s mind, the economic, social, and cultural benefits of the New Moral World could only be fully realized in the idyllic environment of these Agricultural and Manufacturing Villages of Unity and Mutual Cooperation. Each village was to feature a gigantic structure built in the form of America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  Robert Owen’s New Moral World was to be realized in ideal Agricultural and Manufacturing Villages of Unity and Mutual Co-operation projected to dot the international landscape. Owen displayed a six-foot-square model in New York, Philadelphia, and the White House in 1825. Owenites fired bricks to build the first such village south of New Harmony, but construction never began. (From Description of an Architectural Model from a Design by Stedman Whitwell …, 1830.) a quadrangle or parallelogram 1,000 feet on a side and set on a plot of about thirty-three acres with outlying mills, factories, and farmlands. These resembled Fourier’s phalansteries and phalanxes although the two socialists did not borrow this idea from each other. Dwellings resembling the row houses of New Lanark formed the walls enclosing the quadrangle, offering housing with gas lighting and hot and cold running water for 2,000 residents. Everything imaginable was to be included for their comfort and enlightenment, from kitchens, dining halls, baths, laundries, and stores to schools, a library, a museum, botanic gardens, gymnasiums, music rooms, and dance and lecture halls. When noted German American writer Charles Sealsfield (Karl Postl) discovered Owen’s design during his visit to Indiana, he reported that “a plan was shown and sold to us, according to which a new building of colossal dimensions is projected; and if Mr. Owen’s means should not fall short of his good will, this edifice would certainly exhibit the most magnificent piece of architecture in the Union, [only] the Capitol at Washington excepted. This palace, when finished, is to receive his community [from New Harmony].”23 Owen promised the citizens of New Harmony that the first Utopian town-in-a- garden would soon be theirs to enjoy when constructed three miles to the south “on the high Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. lands of Harmony from 2 to 4 miles from the [Wabash] river and its island of which the occupants will have a beautiful and interesting view.”24 This new, quadrangular town, rather than New Harmony, was to be the showplace to be replicated. The actual implementation of Owen’s vision would take place there. Only then would the New Moral World become a local and, over time, a global reality, much as Fourier envisioned exactly 2,985,984 of his joint-stock phalanxes covering the earth and revolutionizing the world order. Owen foresaw giant quadrangles with their fields, factories, and mills dotting every countryside, providing their citizens with every necessity of life. Acting in perfect concert for their mutual prosperity, sharing their superior products on the basis of need rather than profit, these communities were to achieve abundance for all and thus the disappearance of private property and social inequality. As the Great Truth of character America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  formation ultimately triumphed along with these communitarian developments, all humanity would attain happiness along with a regenerated spirit. The Old Immoral World would give way to the New Moral World. In Owen’s words, This second creation or regeneration of man will bring forth in him new combinations of his natural faculties, qualities, and powers which will imbue him with a new spirit, and create in him new feelings, thoughts, and conduct, the reverse of those which have been hitherto produced…. This re-created or new-formed man will be enabled easily to subdue the earth, and make it an ever-varying paradise, the fit abode of highly intellectual moral beings, each of whom, for all practical purposes, will be the free possessor and delighted enjoyer of its whole extent; and that joy will be increased a thousand-fold, because all his fellow-beings will equally enjoy it with him.25 Under these ideal conditions, Owen came to believe that the average life span would be extended to as many as 140 years.26 Even the experience of terminal illness and death would lose the terror and grief it held during the individual isolation of the Old Immoral World. Instead, as Owen imagined, In these happy villages of unity, when disease or death assail their victim, every aid is near; all the assistance that skill, kindness, and sincere affection can invent, aided by every convenience and comfort, are at hand. The intelligent resigned sufferer waits the result with cheerful patience … and, when death attacks him, he submits to a conqueror who he knew from childhood was irresistible, and whom for a moment he never feared! … The survivors … have consolation in the certain knowledge that within their own immediate circle they have many, many others remaining; and around them on all sides, as far as the eye can reach, or imagination extend, thousands on thousands, in strict, intimate, and close union, are ready and willing to offer them aid and consolation…. Here may it be truly said, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”27 Driven by their hope for such an idealistic future, William Pelham noted, the New Harmony Owenites fired 240,000 bricks in their first summer of 1825 in a field adjacent to the proposed site, where a few broken ones can still be found. In August 1825 Pelham wrote optimistically Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. to his son that “in 2 years, the contemplated new village will be ready for the reception of members.”28 However, the New Harmony experiment itself collapsed a few months before Pelham’s targeted date. None of the proposed structures rose from the waiting bricks. And no other Owenite community came even this close to beginning the grandiose quadrangle with its illusive promise of realizing the New Moral World. Although Robert Owen always asserted that all of his lofty ideas were original, born of his own experience and intuition, his approach to the social problems of the industrial age did not originate in an intellectual vacuum. His thoughts and actions clearly identify him with the Enlightenment rationalism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that expressed concern over the social effects of industrialization and called for social planning to improve living conditions and even to perfect human character. Owen’s voracious reading at America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  McGuffog’s, his association in the 1790s with the Literary and Philosophical Society in Manchester, and his membership in the Glasgow Literary and Commercial Society after 1800 gave him opportunities to begin absorbing these modern concepts. During his quarter-century at New Lanark he became acquainted with noted social theorists William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, and James Mill. His private conversations with them and his reading of their published works affected Owen’s thinking, as did the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau and other Enlightenment figures. He borrowed directly from some of them. Perhaps the most obvious influence is Godwin’s An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793). It is reflected in Owen’s A New View of Society, the first printed summary of his ideas in 1813. However, where Godwin’s new social order called for justice, equality, and freedom for the individual, Owen stressed the achievement of human happiness, which not only promised fulfillment in body, mind, and spirit but also implied making everyone manageable.29 One London critic, William Hazlitt, took offense at Owen’s calling his view of society “new.” He insisted that “it is as old as The Political justice of Mr. Godwin, as the Oceana of [James] Harrington, as The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, as the Republic of Plato.”30 Owen and his movement were also closely associated with the earliest attempts to place the understanding and control of the individual and society on a scientific footing. He became friends with several professors at the University of Glasgow and the University of Edinburgh who were among the Scottish moral philosophers and political economists seeking bases for the scientific study of man and society that emerged as the behavioral sciences. Many Owenite converts who thought deeply about solutions for the problems of industrial society gained their first interest in behavioral science from Owen’s impassioned call for a science of society.31 Behaviorism composed the core of the Great Truth of the ages that Owen naively claimed as his own personal revelation. He referred to this Great Truth as the Messiah. He believed it had come to mankind through him, and he expressed it as one simple concept that drove his entire system of logic: “It is of all truths the most important, that the character of man is formed FOR —not BY himself.”32 Therefore, on a broad scale Owen claimed that “any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means; which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.”33 Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. This theme dominated Owen’s thought and schemes from 1813, when he subtitled A New View of Society “Essays on the Principle of the Formation of Human Character,” to his last summary of his theories in their final form in The Book of the Moral World, a collection of essays he wrote between 1836 and 1844. Becoming an Owenite cliché laden with implications from the Enlightenment, social science, and environmental determinism, this assumption of the ability to improve individuals, communities, and the world by intentionally forming character underlay all of Owen’s plans. Everything else he tried—in education, legislation, secular millennialism, philanthropy, and building whole villages of unity and mutual cooperation— was a means to this end. Owen’s partners fired him from his managerial position over the New Lanark mills in 1812. If this had not occurred, he might never have started writing the propaganda that marked the America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  beginning of a distinct, nonsectarian Owenite movement with character formation as its fundamental principle and improvement of conditions of the poor, the unemployed, and the working classes as its practical goal.34 His original partners having grown weary of his expensive educational projects, he was forced to seek the genuine reform advocates, including Jeremy Bentham, with whom he repurchased the mills and regained his managerial position in 1813. During months of scouting for partners in London, Owen used his first anonymous pamphlet, Statement Regarding the New Lanark Establishment (1812), to begin defining his theories, achievements, and plans. From that time forward he looked increasingly outward from his New Lanark base to achieve reforms of national and, eventually, international proportions. With the eager encouragement of his new business associates, Owen began the developmental process by which he hoped to make his reforms effective in New Lanark and beyond. He proclaimed the solutions already found in his own small, self-contained mill community capable of solving the universal problems of poverty, unemployment, and ignorance in industrial society. Yet he tried gradual reform before adopting the laborious and expensive communal method of creating whole communities. As historian Arthur Bestor observes, The communitarian tendencies that marked Owen’s activity at New Lanark were born of local circumstances rather than deliberate choice. Whether he would develop, in the national arena, a communitarian or a legislative (that is to say, a gradual) program was an open question. His first proposals were neither decisively the one nor the other. A New View of Society described at length his various proceedings at New Lanark and suggested, by unmistakable inference, that one path to reform might well be the imitation of them in other small-scale experiments. On the other hand, the final essay was entitled “The Principles of the Former Essays Applied to Government,” and therein Owen advocated national programs of education and public works.35 When Owen opted first for the legislative route, it became clear that Owenism in its earliest years was not (and actually never became) a “communal movement.” Community building never replaced character formation and the achievement of human happiness as the Utopian commitment of the Owenite movement. As founding model communities became important to Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. Owenites after 1816, these safe havens for character development and standard of living improvement always remained for them the means to an end, like legislation, education, science, and technology, not ends in themselves. This helps explain why Owenism remained viable during, between, and following its waves of communal usage from 1825 to the 1860s in America and Britain, unlike certain other well-known movements. Shakers, Harmonists, Zoarites, and Janssonists eventually sacrificed the souls, if not the very existence, of their original movements to inflexible communal and other disciplines. Perhaps to this day the best-kept secret of the appeal and developmental vitality of the Owenite movement is that, although living in ideal communities became the centerpiece of Owenite methodology, no one ever felt required to start or live in a cooperative village in order to be an Owenite or to embrace Owenite socialism. The great majority of America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  Owen’s followers, in fact, never entered any of the nineteen American or nine British Owenite or Owenite-influenced communities. Furthermore, since Owenism never succeeded in forming communities in the number, size, or geographic scope called for to reform even a single county —let alone a nation or the world—no true Owenite ever considered the movement a failure. This does not discount the fact that Owen himself conceived of the formation of character taking place at both the individual and community levels, that eventually “the community, or Village of Cooperation, was the central institution of Owenism,” or that “the largest practical commitment of the Owenite movement, measured by the amount of time, effort and capital involved, was to community building.”36 However, Bestor confirms that “in his next important move [in 1815] Owen leaned definitely toward legislative, not communitarian, means.”37 At that time the cotton manufacturer began directing his energies toward convincing Parliament to enact nationally some features of his own enlightened factory management. These included forbidding child labor under age ten, requiring four years of schooling before child employment, restricting work to ten and a half hours per day for children under eighteen, and, yes, ensuring compliance by hiring government inspectors. Yet Owen was soon frustrated with the snail’s pace of legislative reform. Not until 1819 did he see any act passed. Then it came with dishearteningly reduced provisions. Only the Factory Act of 1833, long after he had forsaken lobbying Parliament, came close to his recommendations. Even when he appealed to his industrialist friends to voluntarily adopt more humane standards in their own plants and villages, he was discouraged with the negative response. Therefore, he finally turned to the community-building alternative.38 He felt this promised more immediate, complete, and salutary results than gradual reform or assistance to individuals separately. Also, it would cancel, he thought, any repeat of violent revolution such as had shaken France. The master of New Lanark dramatically announced this new direction for the next phase of Owenism at the opening of his Institution for the Formation of Character on New Year’s Day 1816. From that day until his death in 1858, his ever-changing proposals on the nature and application of his community plan passed through three distinct stages, eventually coming full circle to match his early class consciousness and paternalism.39 In the first stage (1816–24) he held conservatively to strict division of the social classes in separate Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. communities funded by the government, industrialists, aristocratic philanthropists, or if all else failed, workers themselves. To Owen’s chagrin, no viable communities were begun during this period.40 In the second stage (1824–29), which began with Owen’s coming to America and the founding of New Harmony and other experimental communities, he made radical statements in support of common property and equality among community members. These ideals became stamped erroneously in many minds then and since as the only “real” Owenism. For Owen they represented his concessions in word to the social leveling process he saw around him in American society. He sensed the egalitarian waves from Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, the Second Great Awakening, and the perpetual frontier moving across the American landscape. As early as the 1810s, Owen the milltown owner and paternalistic philanthropist came under strong influence by the community of property example of American America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  sectarian com-munalists, especially the Harmony Society from whom he purchased New Harmony in January 1825 and the sixteen thriving Shaker settlements. However, Owen’s suggestions of a future age without private property found roots in his belief that surplus production would eventually supply everyone with the necessities of life in abundance. He did not believe or advocate that anyone should be forced to relinquish private property through coercion or violence as in Marxist theory—a point on which Marx and Engels never forgave him. As early as 1820 Owen stated the heart of his economic theories in his Report to the County of Lanark. He argued that since manual labor is the source of all wealth, laborers can properly claim their fair share (and some later Owenites such as William Thompson asserted this share to be the entirety of production in ideal communities). Owen foresaw in planned agricultural and manufacturing villages of cooperation such surplus that “each may be freely permitted to receive from the general store of the community whatever they may require.”41 Although he always held that both communal property and social equality were contingent on unlimited production, Owen and Owenism were pushed to advocate these ideals publicly during this period partly because of the writings of the movement’s three main economic theorists in Britain: William Thompson, John Gray, and Thomas Hodgskin.42 In reality, as long as the Old Immoral World endured in the general society, Owen’s words in support of social and economic equality went far beyond his will or ability to implement them, even in a “community of equality” of his own making. Robert Owen entered the final stage of his communitarian proposals in 1836. This came only after an interlude in which in some respects he became more radical by associating closely with the working classes for the first time in his life. In England between 1829 and 1835 he helped them initiate their own cooperative and trade union movements. The radicalism he learned during that time crept into his own movement as a denunciation of bankers, merchants, civilian professionals, military leaders, and the entire aristocracy as useless perpetrators of the harmful prevailing social system.43 Otherwise he retreated into the more conservative posture of his 1816–24 period of justifying class divisions, paternalism, and philanthropic funding for communities. Perhaps the genius of communitarian Owenism lies in this very flexibility. Bestor suggests, Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. The phrases by which he referred to his plans—a “new moral world,” a “rational system of society”—were without economic content. His communities were designed to bring such a moral or rational society into being, and their economic organization was merely a subordinate part of the mechanism—a means, not an end. On secondary matters Owen never felt it necessary to commit himself, permanently and explicitly. To consult expedience in adapting means to ends, to modify subordinate details as need arose, was his normal procedure. Inconsistencies in economic detail were a natural consequence of his pragmatic approach.44 At first Owen called for self-sufficient communities of 500 to 1,500 residents to benefit only paupers and the greatly expanding ranks of the unemployed at the close of the Napoleonic America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  wars, bringing to mind the New Deal homesteads of the 1930s in America.45 Then, in 1817, he published the writings that committed his movement to a well-defined communitarian program for the much broader, even Utopian, purpose of reorganizing the entire society for the emancipation of mankind. His expanded plan prescribed three new levels of communities above those for paupers and the unemployed. These, known as Villages of Unity and Mutual Co-operation, provided for separate communities to accommodate the unpropertied working class, the propertied working class, and wealthy aristocrats. The aristocrats, joined together in Voluntary and Independent Associations, must own property worth 1,000 to 20,000 pounds sterling. In his native Britain, before coming to New Harmony, Owen did not advocate any leveling process in present society or even placing individuals from different classes in the same village. Had he kept to this segregated plan, he might have spared New Harmony from the class conflicts that helped destroy its social fabric. In Britain he knew there could be nothing in his propaganda to frighten the upper class to whose interest in profit and philanthropy he addressed his appeal for support in establishing a first model village there. He even went so far as to propose with an elaborate chart that at least 140 different classifications of villages could be provided to house only those citizens who were comfortable with those of their own social class, religious sect, and political party.46 In 1818 he personally handed the diplomats at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle copies of his scheme in three languages. In 1822 and 1823 he made speaking tours to Ireland. He persisted in laying his village plan before committees of Parliament until, in May 1824, his best friend in Parliament, Sir William de Crespigny, respectfully requested that he not bring up the matter again. In fact, though, no government, philanthropist, or industrialist stepped forward with any funding to test his plan. The one projected village at Motherwell near Glasgow never got beyond the talking stage. Owen knew that it would take double his fortune of about $250,000 to buy the 700 acres of unimproved land he had considered as a community site in Scotland. By contrast, he and William Maclure would pay a total of only about $135,000 for the complete town of New Harmony with its adjoining 20,000 acres.47 For these and other reasons, the frustrated reformer jumped at a chance to test his theories far away in America by means of his own philanthropy. The opportunity came in the summer of 1824 when Richard Flower, cofounder of the English settlement of Albion, Illinois, up the Wabash from Harmonist New Harmony, arrived in New Lanark. As an agent for the Harmony Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. Society of George Rapp, he was trying to sell their second communal town, known as both Harmony (Harmonie) and New Harmony (Neu Harmonie). Owen found that personal, business, and managerial problems in New Lanark made it remarkably easy for him to phase out those responsibilities in order to devote all his time to his new social reform career. His marriage was contentious. His pious business partners were so upset with his public stand against established religion and a report that he had banned the Bible from New Lanark that they forced him to revise his prized school program and threatened to relieve him from his directorship of the mills. Even his normally congenial relations with his own employees were in disarray. He had seized the assets of their own benefit fund and frequently absented himself from his milltown as a general wage controversy swept the cotton industry of Scotland. The very scope and uniqueness of his New Lanark reforms came into question when an outbreak of America's Communal Utopias, edited by Donald E. Pitzer, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/fsu/detail.action?docID=797757. Created from fsu on 2024-10-24 15:41:08.  typhoid fever suggested that Owen had overblown his claims for hygiene and housing in the village. Two books appeared claiming that social conditions in some other milltowns, including one at Catrine, at least equaled those instituted by Owen in New Lanark.48 When Owen, at age fifty-three, sailed from Liverpool for America in October 1824, he tried to break completely from his New Lanark problems. He did not return until 1827 and by 1829 had sold all his interests there, living from a modest annuity during the rest of his long life. Enroute to the United States he fixed his sights on inspecting and buying a second ready-made town. On the Indiana frontier he imagined he could begin a new community process to achieve the happiness for the entire human race that he could not find even for himself in his first experiment in New Lanark. Mercifully perhaps, his Utopian vision blinded him from realizing how inadequately his New Lanark experience had prepared him for administrating the first model community for his social movement, a movement that now entered its applied communitarian stage that would last in an array of experimental villages from 1825 to 1863.49 As the British prophet of communitarian socialism stepped ashore in New York on November 4, 1824, he entered a vigorous, young republic that never ceased to inspire and confound him. Liberal Jeffersonian and Jacksonian trends were carrying Americans toward democracy and egalitarianism, while Owen harbored doubts about electoral processes and equality. Americans were still enjoying a period known as the “Era of Good Feelings.” The sections of the nation and the political factions that split so bitterly during the War of 1812 with Britain mended relations after the nation signed the Treaty of Ghent late in 1814 and the conservative Federalist Party died. President James Monroe, who invited Owen to the White House on November 27, had been so universally favored for reelection in 1820 that he received all but one of the votes of the electoral college. The presidential election the month Owen arrived involved four major contenders, all campaigning under the same Republican Party banner. In the first American election in which the actual voters (men with and without property) instead of the stale legislators chose most of the electors for the electoral college, Owen indulged his penchant for being near public figures. He met candidates John Quincy Adams, who won in a House of Representatives runoff, and General Andrew Jackson, whose championing of the interests of farmers, laborers, and small entrepreneurs brought him and his new Democratic Party to power in the next election in 1828.50 During this time of domestic Copyright © 1997. University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. tranquility and an economic downturn from 1819 to 1824 that signaled the beginning of modern business cycles, Americans began to return to their interest in ways to improve their lives and to bring their institutions into line with their ideals.51 Many reform crusades competed for the attention of the American conscience. Voices were raised for temperance, peace, education, the poor, the handicapped, the insane, the slaves, and the rights of women and laborers.52 But