paradise now the story of american utopianism

In 1824, the Welsh socialist and textile magnate Robert Owen came to the village of New Harmony on the Indiana frontier to build a rationalist, communist utopia that he called the New Moral World. Inspired by their success, secular utopians took up the idea that small, planned communities might be the ideal mechanism by which to remake the entire world. By the 1820s, the Shakers had established prosperous villages throughout most of the settled regions of the United States. And the individual would dissolve entirely into the collective. In Zion there would be no property, no family, no sex. To construct their utopia-a federation of tidy, communistic villages-the Shakers invented a new society from scratch, scorning the most fundamental building blocks of western civilization. They believed that the Second Coming had already happened and that it was up to them to build the perfect earthly society: an austere, whitewashed stronghold for the dawning Millennium. Led by the prophet Ann Lee, a small community of Shakers departed the grim mills and slums of Manchester, England, for the colonies, settling in upstate New York during the Revolutionary War. Their vision of a society dedicated to radical equality and intense collectivism was born in the fever dream of religious revelation and the waking nightmare of early British industrialization. The model for a New World utopia was first laid down by the Shakers, a small sect named for their physically raucous method of worship. Mistakenly sensing that the world was on the brink of transformation, the 19th-century utopians built their tiny societies according to a single criterion: their own shining visions of the future. Those efforts to build a radically new type of society reveal an intellectual impulse that has flowed through the American experiment since day one.

It was a time when the imminence of paradise seemed reasonable to reasonable people.īetween the American Revolution and the Civil War, nearly one hundred utopian colonies were founded in the United States. Countless people on both sides of the Atlantic believed that a new and wondrous society was about to take form in the American wilderness. No place on the globe has been more crowded with utopian longing and utopian experimentation than the United States in the middle of the 19th century.

Paradise now the story of american utopianism