Greed, Lust and Gender by Folbre Nancy;

Author:Folbre, Nancy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2009-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Brook Farm

Since few Americans could read French, selective translation could work wonders. The number of communitarian experiments explicitly based on Fourier’s principles outnumbered those based on those of Owen or de Saint-Simon. A disciple named Albert Brisbane proved a most successful agent, compiling a collection entitled The Social Destiny of Man.44 Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, was entranced. Some of America’s most famous writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson engaged one way or another with new communitarian schemes.

The Owenite experiment at New Harmony had failed in 1828, but other communities, founded by the religious groups such as the Rappites and the Shakers, remained afloat. Meanwhile, the ocean had become more turbulent. As factory employment grew, intense price competition and new waves of immigration combined to make prosperity seem precarious. Trade unions elbowed their way into existence. The young women mill workers of Lowell went out on strike in 1834. A major depression in 1837 was followed by several years of stagnation.45

These problems did not escape the attention of a New England intelligentsia whose disapproval of slavery sensitized them to the concept of economic immorality. Some, like Henry David Thoreau, expressed their distaste for the dictates of commercial capitalism by withdrawing from it. Others hoped to further the cause of cooperation. Experiments with names like “Hopedale” and “Fruitlands” began to multiply. In Northampton, Massachusetts, an abolitionist community invested in a new silk manufactory.46 George Ripley, a Unitarian minister in Boston, bid farewell to his congregation in order to embark with friends on a collective enterprise known as Brook Farm.

Originally set up as a joint-stock company, Brook Farm officially converted to Fourierist principles (à la Brisbane) in 1845. Its avowed aim was to unify and more fairly distribute manual and mental labor. Ralph Waldo Emerson declined an invitation to join but expressed his sympathy for its basic principles, writing “In a day of small, sour, and fierce schemes, one is admonished and cheered by a project of such friendly aims.”47 Henry David Thoreau visited for at least a day, as did Margaret Fuller, author of Women in the Nineteenth Century. Nathaniel Hawthorne joined the farm for a while, cheerfully shoveling manure and later writing a fictionalized account of his experience that included a fearful caricature of Margaret.48

The farm became the symbolic center of the Fourierist movement in America, as Ripley took over editorship of its journal, The Harbinger. Still, the enterprise retained an Owenite emphasis on the fullest possible development of human capabilities, and Ripley himself echoed Owen when he described selfishness and cold-heartedness as “poisonous weeds that a false system of culture has produced.”49 Socialism would, he hoped, succeed by growing better fruit and producing more ample honey (the beehive was the official emblem of the farm). Sadly, a new phalanstery building caught fire the day after it had been finished, and two years of concerted collective effort went up in flames. The fragile finances of the farm collapsed.

In a way, Emerson had

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