All-American Communes

I’m far from patriotic and so it seems wild to me to label anything,  “All-American”, but I also realize that at the beginning of this blog, I spent four months (from a post labeled “US History 1:Why?” on January 1st, 2009, to “USH30: What About Now?”  posted on April 27th) focusing on American history.   

In fact, the most popular post on this blog, by far, is one of the history posts,  “USH25:Social Movements in the Eighties”.  It's had over three thousand page views, which isn't a lot for a blog, I know, but the next most popular post has only five hundred something page views.   My guess is that the reason it's so popular is that it shows up in searches, and it may be one of the few pieces on eighties social movements, and it's being used by high school and college students for writing papers.

I’ve talked extensively here about communes and communities as laboratories for social change and, in my history posts, I also talked about communal histories, especially the utopian communities of the nineteenth century.  I have thought about that as the beginning of the communal movement in the US.

Finally, I have a Google newsfeed set up to flag any articles on “Communes" or “Intentional Communities”.  Recently this showed up.

 

It's a promotional piece for a talk on the Oneida community.  I’ve always been fascinated by this community, but what grabbed my attention was the beginning of the piece.   

The author mentions the communes of the sixties and how ‘counter-culture’ and, for some people, ‘un-American’ they were.   He then goes on to say: “In reality, though, they were as American as apple pie.  We often miss the fact that the English colonies in America started out as experimental utopian societies: the Pilgrims with their communism and commitment to the simple life; Massachusetts and the other Puritan colonies, with their austerity and a commitment to self-examination and self-criticism that would make Chairman Mao cheer; Rhode Island, with its commitment to anarchy; the Pennsylvania Quakers, with their pacifism and their mysticism; the pacifist anabaptist sects, with their semi-closed communities; Georgia, where the rulers imported misfits and criminals so as to reprogram them after isolating them in the wilderness.

“Our pioneer settlers were the lunatic fringe, and when they sailed away, folks back in Europe were delighted to wave goodbye.”

It’s a very different view of American history, and one that makes me appreciate that the communal experiments that a bunch of us are engaging in, go a long way back.

Quote of the Day: “We got another burst of utopian communities in the middle of the 19th century, as the world was turning toward the modern age, away from lifestyles that had endured for a thousand years. … While dozens of such communities speckled the American landscape, they lay especially thick in a band then ran from Boston to Buffalo. “ - Kirk House