Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table by Ellen Wayland-Smith

Author:Ellen Wayland-Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 19th Century, America, History, Nonfiction, Religion, United States, Food and Drink
ISBN: 9781250043108
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2016-05-03T03:00:00+00:00

10

Things Fall Apart

With John Humphrey Noyes in absentia (incongruously “fishing on the St. Lawrence in Canada,” according to a journal entry by Francis Wayland-Smith), rumors at Oneida sprang up like wildfire, including the old saw that Noyes had once again appointed Theodore in charge of the Community (which turned out, once again, to be pure fantasy). Evening Meetings continued, tense but moderately civil. Noyes’s sister Harriet Skinner noted that a passage from the Bible read in meeting the day following Noyes’s departure particularly captivated the audience, with the recent “experience of the Community [giving] a new meaning to every word”: “Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth! And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature: and it is set on fire of hell.” (James 3: 5) The tongue was indeed a fire; the backbiting and infighting, whispered accusations, and panicked rumors in the wake of Noyes’s waning leadership were consuming Oneida.1

A scramble to fill the power vacuum at Oneida ensued, with Noyes loyalists closing ranks against the “proponents of anarchy,” as Wayland-Smith termed them, opposition leaders James W. Towner and William Hinds. Though a staunch Noyes supporter, Wayland-Smith, who had collaborated professionally with Hinds as coeditor of The American Socialist, stepped into the role of mediator between the two warring parties. On June 25, 1879, Wayland-Smith wrote in his journal that he had had a sincere discussion with Hinds on the current political situation, during which he had clarified that while he “agreed with [Hinds] that the government of the Community might be made more representative to advantage,” Hinds’s method of going about it—bypassing Noyes altogether and “inaugurat[ing] a revolutionary movement”—was ill-advised and that the real way to accomplish change was to do it in collaboration with Noyes. Wayland-Smith believed that, having lost confidence in the founder, the “true and honorable way for [Hinds] was to leave, and not stay here and imperil our home by starting a revolution.” To which Hinds replied, rather testily, that Wayland-Smith would be “grey as a rat” if he were to wait for any compromise to come from Noyes and that he fully intended to stay and “make such changes as he [thought] desirable” to the governance of the Community. A house divided if ever there was one.2

In Noyes’s absence, the Administrative Council, consisting of members drawn from both the loyalist and opposition camps, was named and voted in. What the Hinds-Towner party demanded was, first, a measure of egalitarian, representative government in the running of the Community. In a list of “suggestions” drawn up by Hinds and submitted via Wayland-Smith to Noyes, suggestion number 3 proposed that the “question of Mr. Noyes’s successor in the presidency” be subject to a vote by “all covenanted members” of the Oneida Community. This was a direct rebuff to Noyes’s claim that he had the right to appoint his own successor.

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