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EH.NET BOOK REVIEW 
 
Published by EH.NET  (February 1998) 
 
Donald E. Pitzer, editor, _America's Communal Utopias_.  Chapel Hill: 
University of North Carolina Press, 1997.  xxi + 537 pp. $60.00 (cloth), 
ISBN 0-8078-2299-X. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-4609-0. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by John E. Murray, Department of Economics, 
University of Toledo.  <[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
     This book consists of 18 essays on American communal societies 
that were founded before the middle of the present century.  The authors 
are well known specialists in their fields and include several (Priscilla 
Brewer, Carl Guarneri, and Robert Sutton among them) who have written well 
received monographs on particular groups.  Each chapter contains an essay, 
endnotes, a chronology of events, and a bibliography.  The essays vary in 
tone from the objective (Donald Durnbaugh on colonial communes) to the 
partisan (Lawrence Foster on Oneida and James Landing on the Koreshan 
Unity), but the level of scholarship is high throughout. 
 
     The volume has two goals, according to the editor: to provide an 
introduction to the interesting history of American communal experiments 
(some of which are thriving today) and to frame these histories within the 
editor's notion of "developmental communalism."  This schema proposes that 
communalism is but a phase in a community's life, and after it passes the 
former commune remains worthy of study (xvii).  Exactly why a place should 
continue to be considered a "communal utopia" after it becomes just another 
community is never made clear, and thankfully in a book weighing in at 550 
pages, most contributors let the concept slide. 
 
     One improvement over most of the literature on American communalism 
is the inclusion of an essay (the longest in the set, in fact) on Catholic 
religious orders, with emphasis on the monastic orders.  The vow of poverty 
taken by male and female Catholic religious means that each such community 
operates just like any other communal society.  Lawrence McCrank drily 
notes the absence of these groups from the communal studies canon (p. 241). 
Inadvertently, Jonathan Andelson's essay on Amana suggests a rationale for 
this traditional omission: Support of the monasteries by "powerful 
institutions of the wider society places them in a slightly different 
category" (p.202).  Meaning what?  That the only reason for the hundreds of 
such communities in America today is subsidies from the Vatican?  McCrank's 
thorough essay represents one step in bringing such attitudes into the 
twentieth century. 
 
     The other extremely successful communal group, the Hutterites, is the 
subject of a fine chapter by Gertrude Huntington.  She emphasizes their 
growth within a set of fixed ideological and economic constraints, quite in 
opposition to the "developmental communalism" framework.   The inclusion of 
a piece by the late Karl J. R. Arndt is to be welcomed.  Here is a scholar 
who devoted his life to translating, editing, and explicating the huge 
written record of the Harmonists, and his chapter here is a model one. 
Other essays fare less well.  Foster's enthusiasm for Oneida's ideals lead 
him to overlook a fundamental moral problem with "complex marriage:" the 
coercion of sexual activity from girls, some prepubescent, by older men in 
general and John Humphrey Noyes (Oneida's founder) in particular. 
Landing's otherwise charming piece on Cyrus Teed ("Koresh") is just a 
little less purple than that of his subject in describing the reception by 
the "scientist" Teed (he was an alchemist) of his call to communal 
life. 
 
     The reader cannot help but wonder what separated such long 
lived groups as the Benedictines, the Hutterites, the Amana 
Inspirationists, the Harmonists, and the Shakers from the relative 
will-o'-the-wisps like most of the other groups considered here.  That 
vital topic is not taken up here as intensively as it was in Rosabeth 
Moss Kanter's sociological classic _Commitment and Community_ 
(Harvard University Press, 1972).  Religion, to be sure, seems to have 
been a critical variable, while celibacy seems not to have been (cf. the 
Hutterites).  Ethnicity, that quicksilver among cultural concerns, clearly 
played a role, since so many of the successful groups had German 
origins: the Hutterites, the Harmonists, the Amana Inspirationists, and 
the early Ephrata community (all considered here) as well as the Zoarites 
and St. Nazianz (not considered here). 
 
     Analytically, much research remains to be done on communal histories. 
Records of these experiments make them perfect laboratories for the social 
scientific historian.  Issues of routinization of the founders' charisms, 
conversion of the second generation to communal belief, and incentives 
driving the down-and-out into such groups pervade every chapter.  This 
volume provides a valuable starting point for all those interested in the 
topic, whether as researcher, teacher, or curious general reader.  Those 
interested in paths not taken in American history will find much that is 
worth thinking about in this volume. 
 
 
John E. Murray 
Department of Economics 
University of Toledo 
 
John E. Murray's essays on the Shakers have appeared in _Bulletin of the 
History of Medicine_, _Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion_, 
_Explorations in Economic History_, and _Journal of Interdisciplinary 
History_. 
 
 
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