What Hath God Wrought (43 page)

When the target year expired on April 18, Miller publicly apologized for his evident mistake. But his followers were not all ready to give in. One of them, Samuel Snow, recalculated and decided that the correct day for Christ’s return would be the next Jewish Day of Atonement: October 22, 1844. (Snow used the ancient Jewish calendar of the Karaite sect, thinking it the one Daniel had used, not the calendar of modern mainstream Judaism.)
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Miller had never been willing to pinpoint a specific day, but eventually he went along with Snow’s prediction because it aroused so much renewed enthusiasm among his followers.

How would people behave if they were convinced the world was coming to an end on a known day only months away? In 1844, many paid their debts, quit their jobs, closed their businesses, left their crops unharvested in the fields. Some who felt guilty about past frauds and cheats turned over money to banks or the U.S. Treasury. Others simply gave away money, keeping no accounting of it. There was a rush to get baptized. On the appointed night, thousands gathered in many locations outdoors to watch the sky. But Jesus did not appear to them, and October 22 became known among Adventists as “the Great Disappointment.” The legend that Miller’s people had donned ascension robes for the occasion was one of many humiliations heaped on the Adventists over the next year by a laughing public that had not quite dared risk scorning them until after the fact.
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William Miller had never formed a denomination while expecting Christ in 1843, for there would have been no point in any long-term planning. But after the Great Disappointment his followers, many of them expelled from their previous churches, kept their movement alive by differentiating themselves more sharply from mainline evangelicalism. The largest group organized as the Seventh-Day Adventists, under the new leadership of Joseph Bates, who declared Sunday observance an unwarranted innovation and restored the Jewish Sabbath, and Ellen Harmon White, an inspired visionary who instituted dietary reforms opposing tobacco, alcohol, coffee, and meat. The denomination reinterpreted Daniel’s prophecy and decided that Christ had entered a new “heavenly sanctuary” on October 22, 1844, in preparation for an early but unspecified return to earth. In the Civil War and subsequent conflicts its members have been conscientious objectors. Miller himself never got over his great embarrassment and retired quietly, but the Seventh-Day Adventists survive to this day.
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III

While the postmillennial mainstream of American Protestantism identified the whole country as God’s new Israel and a model for the other nations, a host of sectarian movements proclaimed their own little communities as examples to mankind. Scholars call these exemplary planned communities “utopias,” a term that does not necessarily have a derogatory connotation, although Marx and Engels used it disparagingly to distinguish “utopian” socialism from their own allegedly “scientific” socialism. In the early republic, many utopian communities flourished, religious and secular, imported and native, each struggling to demonstrate the millennium, literal or figurative, here and now. As one utopian participant put it in 1844: “Our ulterior aim is nothing less than Heaven on Earth.”
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We would err to dismiss these aspirations as a trivial, lunatic fringe. In a time of rapidly changing means of communication and systems of production, when everything from race relations to banking practices came under challenge, there was no sharp distinction between the mainstream and the marginal. The utopians simply carried even further the perfectionism that mainstream evangelists like Charles Finney preached. Typically, they did not so much reject American society as wish to elaborate upon it, to carry its innovative qualities to extremes. Their communities attracted attention out of all proportion to their size. Contemporaries took the communities seriously, whether they sympathized with them or not, as potential alternatives for religious, social, and economic life. Of particular interest are the ways the communities addressed gender issues before there was a women’s movement addressing them in the world at large. Collectively, the communities underscore the experimental nature of American life, its idealism and ambition, its independence from the givens of custom and tradition.

Once again, the story begins with cotton. Robert Owen, a self-made man from Wales, gained a fortune operating cotton textile mills in the mushrooming industrial city of Manchester, England. In 1800, he moved to Scotland and undertook to make a mill town called New Lanark an example of industrial efficiency. A thoroughgoing Enlightenment rationalist who took the technological progress of the age as his analogy, Owen felt confident he knew how to reshape social relations. Such optimism, of course, was not peculiar to freethinkers in that age but shared by many varieties of Christians.

On New Year’s Day 1816, Owen proposed a model community of no more than twenty-five hundred people that could serve as an example to Britain and the world. Each community would be self-governing and hold its property in common. Within its environment a new human nature could be created: healthy, rational, and tolerant. Owen propagated his ideas through a journal appropriately entitled
The New Moral World
. When his Christian wife, Ann Dale Owen, pointed out the analogy between his new moral world and that of the Christian millennium, Robert took to quoting scripture on behalf of his ideas and warning that the end of the existing commercial world was imminent. His own version of behavioral science he labeled “the Great Truth,” acceptance of which would constitute the coming of “the Messiah.”
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As if in imitation of the seventeenth-century Puritans, European visionaries continued to come to America to implement their millennial aspirations. One of these was Robert Owen. At first the American press accorded him a favorable reception. As a successful industrialist, Owen enjoyed credibility; his goal of reaping the advantages of the industrial revolution without its accompanying misery was generally shared. When Owen arrived in the United States in 1824, he met not only starry-eyed reformers but President Monroe, ex-presidents Jefferson and Madison, DeWitt Clinton, Justice Joseph Story, New York and Philadelphia society, and the chiefs of the Chickasaw and Choctaw. In February 1825, he delivered, by special permission, two public lectures in the U.S. Capitol, both attended by president-elect Adams. After moving into the White House, Adams put on display there a six-foot-square architectural model of Owen’s ideal community—also displaying by implication his own sympathies for social engineering.
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Only after Owen publicly confessed his disbelief in the scriptures and denounced the institution of marriage did he put himself beyond the pale of acceptable American opinion.

Robert Owen’s community of New Harmony, Indiana, begun in 1825, lasted only two years. In it not only work but also recreation and meditation were communal and regimented. “I am come to this country,” Owen announced upon his arrival, “to introduce an entire new system of society; to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one and remove all causes for contest between individuals.”
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But Owen and his aides made no attempt to match the training of their prospective members with what a frontier community needed to make itself self-supporting; they ended up with many intellectuals and freeloaders but not enough skilled workers. Owen’s community never reconciled his paternalist control with its goals of rational self-determination, and its members never developed much sense of commitment. Owen collectivized cooking, child care, and other domestic work, all still assigned to the women; in practice, the women members experienced his program as an unwelcome imposition. The most viable aspect of New Harmony turned out to be its school, run by the geologist William Maclure, which continued to function and serve as a model into the 1840s. The workingmen’s library that Maclure founded still survives in New Harmony, Indiana.
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Robert Owen soon returned to Britain, there to attempt other communal utopias, none of which lasted long. In the United States, eighteen other utopian experiments drew in varying degrees upon Owenite principles; the last one, Modern Times, on Long Island, closed in 1863. Owen’s talented sons and daughters (the most famous being Robert Dale Owen) remained in the United States, became citizens, and continued into the next generation their father’s secular humanitarianism, active in such fields as public education, women’s rights, and birth control. Owenism provided a welcome alternative ideology to religion for embattled American freethinkers like Abner Kneeland and the feminist Ernestine Rose. Invoking the paternalist side of Owenism, Jefferson Davis’s older brother Joseph applied the Welshman’s principles of scientific management to slaves on his plantation at Davis Bend, Mississippi, and succeeded admirably in maximizing production.
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In Britain, where Owen’s followers invented the term “socialism” in 1827, his movement became one of the precursors of the Labour Party.

In the 1840s, another form of utopian socialism attracted even more widespread interest in the United States: the Associationism of Albert Brisbane. Brisbane was an American disciple of the French social theorist Charles Fourier. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Fourier had become disillusioned with the inefficiencies and conflicting interests characteristic of competitive commerce. He believed he had found the solution in collectivism practiced on a small scale: planned communities called “phalanxes,” each of exactly 1,620 people, representing all occupations, living on six thousand acres of land. There, work would be fulfilling as well as socially useful. The Frenchman’s meticulous plan sought to match jobs with aptitudes—for example, since children like to play in dirt, he reasoned, they should be the trash collectors. A few such communities, once established, would set so compelling an example that they would gradually convert the rest of world. In this pre-Marxian vision, socialism would be achieved without revolution or violence.

Brisbane adapted Fourier’s scheme for an American audience, carefully avoiding Owen’s mistake of attacking religion and marriage. He presented the phalanx as an example of applied Christianity. It would not be necessary to ban private property; each member of the phalanx would own shares in it and participate in its profits. Brisbane was willing to experiment with phalanxes of only a few hundred people. His program was as much about town planning as about the redistribution of wealth. At present, Brisbane remarked, “there is no adaptation of architecture to our wants and requirements; our houses are as little suited to our physical welfare, as our social laws are to our attractions and passions.” To remedy this, Associationist architects planned to bring members of the phalanx together in central buildings, called “phalansteries,” with generous communal spaces.
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In all, some twenty-eight phalanxes were established in the antebellum United States. Unlike Owen’s New Harmony, they successfully recruited displaced artisans, though they did not get enough farmers. In 1843, Associationism became an even more widespread popular fad than Adventism, reflecting prevalent working-class discontent during economic hard times. Brisbane and other national publicists for the movement never controlled it; to their dismay phalanxes sprang up spontaneously. Associationism was mainly a northern phenomenon, although two Louisiana utopians conceived of gradual emancipation with the freedpeople living in Fourierist communities—plans of course never implemented. But grassroots enthusiasm proved no substitute for investment capital and careful planning. Like New Harmony, the phalanxes assembled too hastily. They over-promised quick material results, could not sustain a common identity, and suffered from internal schisms. None endured more than a dozen years. Their members, never very isolated from the American mainstream, readily reentered it as prosperity returned and the job market improved.
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The intellectual influence of Fourier and Brisbane outlasted the cooperative communities that invoked their name. Though now forgotten, Fourierism, like Owenism, exerted an effect upon American social thinkers throughout the nineteenth century. Horace Greeley, the political journalist and founder of the planned community of Greeley, Colorado, the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the city planner Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park, and the utopian novelist Edward Bellamy illustrate the diversity of Associationism’s impact. The cooperative movement, initiated by Brisbane, remains another part of his legacy, one still visible.
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The interest aroused by communitarian social experiments in the United States on the eve of the industrial revolution revealed something about the mood and temper of the American public, its willingness to entertain a broad range of social and economic possibilities. The seeming boundlessness of America’s prospects and the open-mindedness of its people encouraged the formation of big plans of all kinds, whether for an integrated transportation network, African colonization, utopian communities, or the Second Coming of Christ. Yet the very illimitability and openness of the society that accorded such plans a hearing made it difficult in the last analysis to impose them—as Albert Gallatin, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay learned, as well as Robert Owen. “The tendency of American conditions, as well as the inclination of its people, was for diffusion rather than discipline, toward self-determination and away from supervision, however benign,” the historian Daniel Feller has observed.
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Utopian communities founded for religious motives tended to last longer than secular ones. Like the secular communities, they often addressed issues of particular concern to women. One movement followed a former Quaker named Ann Lee, a charismatic visionary who came to America from England in 1774. Mother Ann’s followers worshipped her as a second incarnation of Christ; as Jesus had been the Son of God, Ann was the Daughter. God the Father they reinterpreted as both Father and Mother. Members called themselves “the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing” but are better known as the Shakers, from a famous ritual dance they performed. In keeping with their theology of gender equality and androgyny, the Shakers adopted a kind of ascetic feminism and accorded leadership positions to women equally with men.
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Like many millennial sectarians, the Shakers rejected mainstream culture and isolated themselves from “the world.” They practiced celibacy to purge themselves from sin in preparation for the end of the world and relied on converts to propagate their sect. (They did, however, adopt orphans and rear them in their communities.)