Paradise Now by Chris Jennings

Author:Chris Jennings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

Music Stopped

New phalanxes continued to be established for the rest of the 1840s, but the bust in West Roxbury was a major blow. “The end of Brook Farm was virtually the end of Fourierism,” wrote John Humphrey Noyes, a close and intelligent observer of the whole movement. “The enthusiasm of hope and victory was gone.” Toward the end of the 1840s, the national economy bounced back with amazing vigor. As financial opportunities for working people proliferated, the appetite for radical cooperative experiments waned. The rush for land and fortune in the West siphoned off many of the same people who, a decade earlier, might have been stirred by the adventurous, utopian rhetoric in The Harbinger. Even some diehard Associationists were lured westward by Dakota gold.

At the same time, northeastern reformers began finally waking up to the urgency of the abolitionist cause. Much of the enthusiasm, cash, and ink that had flowed into the phalanxes of the 1840s was redirected southward and into the Free Soil fight in the West. In the long prelude to war and emancipation, the fight to abolish slavery gradually eclipsed every other progressive cause.

By the end of the 1840s, the northern half of the Republic was littered with defunct or foundering phalanxes. Most of them had been, in Noyes’s words, a “brood of unscientific and starveling ‘picnics.’ ” The community that hung on longest was the North American Phalanx, the rebellious offspring of western New York’s Fourier craze and the Tribune-based propagandists in Manhattan. Despite an abundance of applications, the members of the NAP kept their community small, ignoring pressure from their backers in Manhattan to expand into a more “scientific” trial of Fourier’s theory. The community’s 120 members settled into a happy, stable existence in their modest three-story phalanstery.

In the early 1850s, Marcus Spring, a Quaker abolitionist and one of the wealthiest members of the NAP, called for the community to adopt something like Fourierism-lite: “an intermediate position between the North American Phalanx and ordinary society.” He found considerable support, and in 1853, the community split. Thirty people followed Spring down the road to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where they built a grand stone phalanstery and founded the short-lived Raritan Bay Union. Not long after the split, in September 1854, a fire at the NAP destroyed workshops, mills, the main office building, and a large harvest of wheat and corn. The damage was estimated at $14,000. When the community’s insurer declared bankruptcy, Greeley offered to cover the losses. The fire, however, had exposed a long simmering division within the community. The two factions could not agree on whether to rebuild on the same land or to start over elsewhere. In 1855, twelve years after its founding, the stockholders of the North American Phalanx voted to sell off the estate and go their separate ways.

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