American Socialist Experiments By Herbert Spencer 1916
It is in the fertile States of this (American) Union that the greatest number of Socialist communities have been founded. Repeated failures for a long time did not daunt the enthusiasts. Indeed it almost seemed as if each successive failure only served to propagate a crop of new experiments.
Americans have always fought the theory that history repeats itself. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" is a very popular hymn with us, confirmed optimists that we are and must be. But what shall we say if we continue to fail until seventy times seven times? What if the cause of our failure always reveals a quality in human nature which defies attempts to change it? After all, why should history repeat itself if human nature were continually changing for the better? Is not the very fact that history repeats itself merely another way of expressing the truth that like causes produce like results, and that human nature is the one "cause" which always remains a constant factor?
Just because Hawthorne and Dana and Ripley and Channing were participants, we are apt to look on Brook Farm as the best equipped Socialist community ever established in this country. Nothing could be further from the truth. The intellectual elevation of the Brook Farmers was certain to bring about the early obsequies of their experiment. No one yields to discipline less readily than your intellectual. Ask any officer of the Spanish War what he knows about the obstinacy of the "thinking bayonets" from our colleges.
The Socialist leader, Hillquit, in his History of Socialism in the United States says: "Fourierism was the first Socialist system to attain the dignity of a national movement in the United States. The movement lasted about a decade, from 1840 to 1850, and produced over forty social experiments in different parts of the country." Hillquit might have added that each one of these forty experiments proved a deplorable failure and that pretty nearly all of them were characterized by a revolt against the discipline which the leaders imposed;—a discipline, by the way, which was obviously essential if starvation was to be averted.
At least a dozen American Owenite communities came to grief with substantially the same history to record as that of the Fourier Phalanxes. The Icarian settlements fared no better.
The only Socialist communities which showed any vigor at any time were the religious settlements of the Shakers and other sects. But even these religious experiments are to-day all dead or moribund. The only settlement which still shows much life is the Amana community, which covers seven fertile villages in Iowa. The census of 1910 showed that even this especially favored settlement is slightly falling off in population.
Hinds, the Oneida Socialist, in 1878 wrote a glowing account of Amana. For that matter, in the same book, he wrote a glowing account of the Oneida Community. Relentless evolution turned the Oneida Community into a joint stock company just two years later. But, to revert to Amana:—Hinds tells us that in that community marriage is discouraged, that women work in the field, that "these communists are not a reading people." The first of the Amana "Rules for Daily Life" is "To obey, without reasoning, God, and through God, our superiors," and another "Rule" bids them "Fly from the society of womenkind as much as possible." As a reward Hinds tells us that each Amana dweller is "sure of enough to eat and drink and wear so long as he lives." A fuller saucer of cream and no hope, in other words. Think of it:—seventeen hundred people living on some forty square miles of Iowa farming land, and this is the sole success to which Socialism can point. I fancy, for that matter, that a Socialist experimenter might survive in the Schloss Johannesburg vineyard. Schloss Johannesburg wine is worth five or ten dollars a bottle and that price is sufficiently remunerative easily to offset the economic handicap of Socialism.
East, West, North and South, all over the world, Socialist communities have gone to pieces, and yet hope springs eternal in the human breast.
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