Communitarian Aspirations

Many Americans of the Northeast and Midwest founded religiously inspired communal societies as alternatives to 19th-century commercialization, capitalist competition, industrialization, and urbanization.

The longest-lived and perhaps best known is that of the Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming), a group that originated in 18th-century England but flowered most fully in antebellum America. The movement was founded by Quaker Ann Lee (1736–84), who believed that sexual intercourse was the original sin, that she represented a second, female incarnation of God, and that she was to inaugurate the millennium by restoring the celibacy and sexual equality of Eden. Migrating to New York in 1774 to escape harassment in England, Lee and eight followers founded Watervliet, near Albany, in 1776 and then used revivalism to spread their message in New York and New England. Baptist converts founded a community at New Lebanon, New York in 1785, and within a decade eleven other communities appeared in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine. Shakerism also moved westward, four more communities emerging in Ohio and Kentucky between 1805 and 1809 amid the Second Great Awakening. By the 1840s, when the movement peaked, there were about 6,000 Shakers in nineteen communities, all rural and agrarian, and all prospering under a strong ethic of work, spiritual discipline, and efficiency. But celibacy hampered their growth as accelerating urbanization and industrialization during the late 19th century deprived them of converts and threatened their isolation. Most disappeared by 1900, and today only the Maine community of Sabbathday Lake remains, a living but endangered testament to America’s 19th-century search for spiritual meaning.

Also flowering in the New England-New York region was the movement founded by Vermonter John Humphrey Noyes (1811–86).

The continuing communal inclinations of German pietist groups produced other long-lived—and in these cases ethnically defined—communitarian ventures. In 1804, George Rapp (1757–1847) and about 600 followers left Germany and its Lutheran church to establish Harmony in western Pennsylvania. Devoted to communal property ownership, rigid spiritual discipline, and (after 1807) celibacy, the community prospered. It moved west to Indiana in 1814, establishing the equally successful New Harmony colony on the Wabash River, and then returned to the Pittsburgh area to found Economy in eastern Ohio. An 1832 rebellion against Rapp diminished membership from 800 to about 500, and Rapp’s death began a decline that ended with the community’s 1905 dissolution, a full century after its inception.

Also successful was the Amana colony—or Community of True Inspiration—which had similar pietist origins. About 800 Inspirationists formed a community in the German Rhineland before migrating to the burned-over district in 1843 and founding Ebenezer near Buffalo. There the colony grew to six villages (including two nearby in Canada). In 1854, encroaching urbanization and desire for new land drove the colony westward to Iowa, where they established Amana, an isolated group of seven settlements on the Iowa River. There they enacted communal property arrangements and expanded to 1,800 members. Supported by a successful woolens industry, Amana prospered for several decades, but expanding westward settlement triggered decline in the late 19th century. It became a corporation in 1932, but its members founded the Amana Church Society, which numbered more than 500 in 1995.

By the late 19th century, intensifying transformation in the East and settlement in the Midwest had pushed most communitarian experimentation to the West, particularly New Mexico and California. Its persistence in the 20th century, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, suggests the continuing spiritual hopes and anxieties of American life.