This Day in History: Welsh textile manufacturer Robert Owen was born on this day in 1771. While a successful businessman, he was also a believer in Socialism, and may have even coined the term. About 200 years ago Robert Owen bought land in Ohio to set up a Socialist community. While American may be thought of as a Laissez-Faire country back then, it was also a hotbed of Socialist experimentation, particularly in Ohio. Owen called his community "New Harmony" but like all such Socialist communities, they all failed...usually within 2 years. As Alexander Winston wrote: "They couldn’t run anything properly—flour mill, saw mill, tannery or smithy—and their only solution to problems of production was to write another constitution or make another speech. The industrious soon tired of supporting the idle. From the Nashoba, Tennessee Owenite settlement, leader Frances Wright informed Owen that 'cooperation has nigh killed us all,' and departed. Within two years every Owenite venture, fourteen in all, disintegrated."
There have been many Communist/Socialist communities in early America, such as:
The Labadists
The Ephrata (Pennsylvania) Community
The Shakers
The Harmonists, or Rappists
The Separatists of Zoar (Ohio)
The Hopedale (Massachusetts) Community
The Brook Farm (Massachusetts) Community
The Oneida (New York) Community
The Amana Community was organized on socialistic lines in 1843 near Buffalo, New York, but moved to Amana, Iowa, in 1845.
Woman's Commonwealth (1875) Belton, Texas
Ruskin Co-operative Colony, organized in 1894 in Tennessee
The first Icarian community was set up in Texas in 1848, and the last came to an end in 1895 in Iowa.
Of the Fourieristic phalanges two had a very brief existence in France, and about thirty were organized in the United States between 1840 and 1850. Their aggregate membership was about 4500, and their longevity varied from a few months to twelve years. Aside from the one at Brook Farm, the most noteworthy were: the North American phalanx, founded in 1843 in New Jersey under the direction of Greeley, Brisbane, Channing, and other gifted men, and dissolved in 1855; the Wisconsin, or Cresco, phalanx, organized in 1844, and dispersed in 1850; and the Sylvania Association of Pennsylvania, which has the distinction of being the earliest Fourieristic experiment in the United States, though it lasted only eighteen months.
A number of other communities have been formed within recent years, most of which permit private ownership of consumption-goods and private family life. As none of them has become strong either in numbers or in wealth, and as all of them seem destined to an early death, they will receive only the briefest mention here. Those worthy of any notice are: The Christian Commonwealth of Georgia, organized in 1896, and dissolved in 1900; the Cooperative Brotherhood, of Burley, Washington; the Straight Edge Industrial Settlement, of New York City; the Home Colony in the State of Washington, which has the distinction of being the only anarchist colony; the Mutual Home Association, located in the same state; the Topolambo Colony in Mexico, which lasted but a few months; and the Fairhope (Alabama) Single-Tax Corporation, which has had a fair measure of success, but which is neither socialistic nor communistic in the proper sense.
~John A. Ryan (The Catholic Encyclopedia)
Historic Failures of Applied Socialism in Ohio by Daniel J Ryan 1920
Early American Communism, 1910 Article
The Early Failures of Socialism
No comments:
Post a Comment