The Oneida Community

The religious revivals that swept upstate New York in the early nineteenth century left the region so full of new movements that it was called the Burned-over District. Mormons, Millerites, spiritualists and utopian socialists all found followers there. Among the most original of the new prophets was John Humphrey Noyes, born in Brattleboro, Vermont, in 1811, the son of a congressman. He studied theology at Andover and Yale, and in 1834 announced that he had become free of sin. His licence to preach was withdrawn almost at once.

Noyes developed a theology he called Perfectionism. He argued that the second coming of Christ had already happened in 70 CE, at the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, so believers no longer had to wait for the kingdom of God. They could live without sin here and now, provided they gave up selfishness in every form, including private property and, as he came to argue, exclusive marriage. A note on terms: scholars often prefer “new religious movement” to the word “cult”, which is contested and frequently pejorative; Oneida is usually described as a utopian or communal society.

In the 1840s Noyes gathered a small group of family and followers at Putney, Vermont, where they began sharing property and, by 1846, experimenting with what he called complex marriage. In 1847 local outrage led to his indictment for adultery. Noyes left Vermont before trial, and in 1848 his followers regrouped on land at Oneida Creek in central New York, near the site of an earlier Perfectionist settlement.

Noyes’s ideas about marriage had taken shape over the previous decade. In 1838 he married Harriet Holton, a follower whose family money helped support his printing press and his small circle at Putney. In letters and pamphlets he argued that in the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus had said, there would be no marrying, and that exclusive love between two people was a form of selfishness that perfect believers should overcome. His critics saw this as a cover for licence; his followers saw it as the logical end of a life of shared goods. The move to Oneida gave him the chance to put the theory into practice on a larger scale, away from the neighbours who had driven him out of Vermont.

The community grew to about 300 members, most of them from respectable farming and professional families in New England and New York. They lived together in a great brick building, the Mansion House, expanded several times from the 1860s. Meals were taken in common, children over infancy were raised together in a children’s wing, and evenings were spent in meetings, lectures, music and plays. Women wore short skirts over loose trousers and cut their hair short, a practical style that outsiders found startling.

Complex marriage was the community’s best-known and most controversial feature. Every adult was considered married to all the others, and exclusive attachments, called “special love”, were criticised as selfish. Sexual relations were arranged through older members acting as intermediaries, and a principle of “ascending fellowship” encouraged younger members to associate with older, supposedly more spiritual ones. Historians today judge that this system drew adolescents into sexual relations with adults, including Noyes himself, which is now regarded as abuse.

Discipline came through mutual criticism. A member who sought improvement, or was thought to need it, sat silently while a committee or the whole community described his or her faults. Many members later remembered the practice as painful but valuable. From 1869 Noyes also launched “stirpiculture”, a breeding programme in which a committee chose parents believed to be spiritually and physically superior. Fifty-eight children were born under it, a number of them fathered by Noyes and his son Theodore.

The community supported itself through industry. The steel animal traps designed by Sewell Newhouse became a highly profitable business, followed by travelling bags, silk thread, canned fruit and, from the late 1870s, tableware. A branch community at Wallingford, Connecticut, helped with manufacturing. By the 1870s Oneida employed hundreds of local workers, and visitors came by train to picnic on its lawns.

The community also valued learning. It published a newspaper, the Circular, which carried Noyes’s talks and news of daily life, and it kept a large library. In the 1860s and 1870s it sent several young men to study at Yale and elsewhere, hoping to train doctors, engineers and lawyers for its own needs. This investment in education proved double-edged: the students returned with scientific and secular ideas that made some of them doubt the founder’s religious authority.

In the 1870s the community came under strain from several directions. Noyes was ageing and in poor health, and his attempt to pass leadership to his son Theodore, who had doubts about religion, divided members. Younger people educated at universities questioned the founder’s theology. Outside, Professor John W. Mears of Hamilton College led a campaign among local clergy against the community’s sexual system, and in early 1879 a conference of clergymen called for legal action.

In June 1879, warned that he might face prosecution, Noyes left secretly for Canada. In August he advised the community to give up complex marriage, and members either married or chose celibacy. The common property system did not long survive. On 1 January 1881 the community was reorganised as a joint-stock company, Oneida Community, Limited, with shares divided among former members. Noyes lived out his life with a few loyal followers at Niagara Falls, Ontario, where he died in 1886.

The joint-stock company struggled at first, but in the early twentieth century Pierrepont Noyes, a son of the founder born under stirpiculture, turned it towards silver-plated tableware. Oneida became one of America’s best-known brands, and many descendants of community members worked for it. The Mansion House still stands as a museum and residence.

Historians have long been fascinated by Oneida. Some, like Lawrence Foster, see it as a serious attempt to reorganise family and gender in the name of religious ideals, comparable to the Shakers and the early Mormons. Others, like Ellen Wayland-Smith, a descendant of members, stress the power Noyes held over members’ most intimate lives and the costs it imposed on women and young people. Both views agree that Oneida was among the most radical and long-lived communal experiments in nineteenth-century America.