September 8, 2018 • 24 mins
Today's episode revisits preacher John Humphrey Noyes founding the Oneida community in 1848. In this episode, Deblina and Sarah recount the rise and fall of the Oneida community -- including its focus on shared labor, gender equality and free love.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. We recently got an email from listener
Ellen who asked us to do a show about the
onidat Utopia, and that's one that's already in our archive
from back in tleven from our previous hosts Sarah and Babuina.
One of the things that's really strongly associated with the
Anida community was free love and complex marriages. And that
means that there is a little more sex talk, in
(00:23):
a little more candid sex talk in today's show than
you might typically associate with us. It might even be
a lot more so Happy listening, Welcome to Stuff you
missed in history Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(00:46):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm
Deblina Chuckerboarding, and today we're gonna talk a little bit
more about free love. I mean, hopefully that makes you
keep on listening right away. But I was thinking about
it because we did a podcast a couple of weeks
ago on Victoria wood Hall, who was the first female
presidential candidate. And I don't know if you want to
give a quick recap of her beliefs on free love. Yeah,
(01:10):
she basically didn't believe free in free love in the
sense that everyone should be having sex with each other.
But she did believe that people should have the choice
whether or not to be together. So that was just
a little bit about it. You didn't have to be
stuck in a marriage if you didn't want to be. Now,
So we we had her on our minds. And then
also I co edited an article recently that Molly Edmonds
(01:33):
wrote one of the hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told
You on polyamory, and so it came up again, and
she actually even mentioned the Oneida Community in her article.
So both of those examples got me thinking about this community,
which is probably the most famous example of organized free
love in American history, and it is, of course the
(01:54):
Oneida Commune or Oneida Community in New York State. Yeah,
when I first started researching this with you, it seemed
almost too crazy to be real. I don't know, Maybe
I've just lived too sheltered a life. Maybe I'm alone
in this, but I don't know. Can you tell us
a little bit about some of these things? It does
sound too crazy to be real, And that's partly because
(02:15):
the people that made up this large Victorian community shared
not only property and labor, but of course sexual partners,
and they surprisingly earned boatloads of money through these really
successful marketing schemes. I think that's sort of the first
loop in this In this episode, they were actually quite
successful financially. Another potentially strange fact about them they regarded
(02:40):
the genders equally and they shared labor, so pretty surprising.
The ladies even more pantaloons. You can look up pictures
of them. They have short skirts and little pantaloons underneath.
And um. Then, maybe the strangest thing of all. Their
eventual undoing came about when this eugenics inspired breeding pro
Graham left the younger members yearning for good old fashioned
(03:03):
courtly love and and monogamous marriage. And for those of
you who own some fine Oneida silver, you might know
where it goes from there. The commune doesn't last forever,
much like a lot of other communes, even those that
are often considered to be the most successful in American history,
like Oneida. So who was behind this Oneida community in
(03:24):
the first place. This guy named John Humphrey. Noise and
it's not doesn't look like noise. It's n O y
E s. In case you want to look up this
guy a little more. But yeah, the commune and the
ideas behind it came from his ideas and preaching. And
he was born in eighteen eleven in Vermont. He was
a wealthy kid. He went to Dartmouth and then to
(03:45):
law school. Really seemed to be on the right track
to being a well off New England lawyer until he
attends a revival of evangelist Charles Finney in eighteen thirty one,
and at that point he decides to become a minister instead,
so big career change. But but even then he seems
like he was possibly on the track to becoming just
a well off New England minister instead of a lawyer.
(04:08):
He went to Andover Theological Seminary. From there he transferred
to Yale. But after that his ideas started to get
kind of out there, and definitely two out there. For Yale,
he believed in something called perfectionism, which was the idea
that after conversion we are free from sin, which obviously
(04:30):
that idea didn't sit very well with the Calvinist faculty
at Yale and they denied his ordination. Yeah, so just
to give you a little background on the beliefs that
he had. They extend from the central idea of Perfectionism,
and they're pretty controversial. He, for one thing, thinks the
Second Coming has come and gone already. In fact, he
thinks that happened in a d seventy at the destruction
(04:52):
of the Temple in Jerusalem. This meant that man didn't
have to wait for heaven to be one with God.
You could do it here on earth as well. But
to do so you had to leave the world and
live according to the laws of heaven, like maybe in
a commune run by noise. So he gets kicked out
of Yale, and he starts kind of meeting with other perfectionists,
(05:13):
learning the drill, talking to people going on the circuit,
and he decides, well, I'm going to start my own
group here, and he organizes the Bible Communists in Putney, Vermont,
in eighteen thirty six and preaches love and harmony to them.
And it's interesting to sort of get a look at
what type of people were joining this group, the Bible Communists.
(05:35):
They were mostly small town folks. They came from all
sorts of occupation, something that probably proved useful down the line,
and you know, maybe if it had stayed at this level,
it would have been pretty under the radar. You know,
a religious group that's too radical for Gale, but not
so radical that it doesn't fit in in some way
(05:55):
with all of the revivals sweeping the United States at
this time, then Noise shakes things up a little bit. Yeah,
he doesn't just keep it at that level. Just a
year after starting that group, Noise writes the so called
battle Axe Letter. And this letter it really gets the
public riled up. It stirs up a lot of controversy
because it advocates free love. Specifically, it says, quote, when
(06:20):
the will of God is done on earth as it
is in heaven, there will be no marriage. And his
rationale came from scripture. It came from Matthew, which says
for in the Resurrection, they neither marry nor are given
in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.
So Noise took this to mean that marriage should not
be exclusive. All men should be married to all women
(06:42):
and it's something called complex marriage. So this is definitely
an example of free love that's different from the one
we talked about in the Victoria Woodhole episode. Quite different
in fact, but the idea, just like Victoria Woodhell made
Noise in his followers incredibly in its corious and when
they actually start practicing complex marriage by eighteen forty six,
(07:05):
which is a little bit after they decide that they're
going to share all their property and all their belongings,
it does not sit well with their neighbors in Putney, Vermont,
not at all. And Noise is arrested for adultery because
he is married legally, and he jumps bail, and by
eighteen forty eight he and most of his followers DeCamp
for Oneida, New York. And there are a few other
(07:28):
satellite communities, but the main Oneada community is set up
there in New York and it lasts for another thirty years.
So we're gonna talk more about free love and that
aspect of the community later, but first, it's interesting to
figure out how these perfectionists Biblical communists actually made a living. Yeah, well,
(07:49):
at first they don't write the two hundred people that
live in this community. They try farming and logging. It's
a situation where men and women are sharing the same
rights and lay bur but the community isn't doing well
enough to support itself for the long term. So then
things start picking up eventually, though when they start manufacturing
(08:10):
things again into manufacturing work a little more reliable. Yeah,
So what sorts of things were they manufacturing. They were
canning and jarring veggies and fruit, also processing silk and printing.
They were milling grist mills and sawmills both and making
small goods like traveling bags. Yeah, and there. That was
all pretty successful for them. But the big win, the
(08:31):
thing that really made them sustainable, was the invention of
one of the community's members, a guy named Suel new House,
and he came up with a new kind of lightweight
animal trap for for animals, and the trap market at
the time was not so crowded that you couldn't have
a new a new trap birth through and so by
(08:53):
the mid eighteen fifties, they were making so many of
these traps, and they were selling them so well that
they had to hire on wade workers, which was kind
of at odds with their belief because they were not
only against slavery, they were also against wage labor, and
especially seasonal wage labor, because at this point people would work,
they'd have jobs during the summer, and then they'd get
(09:14):
laid off in the winter, especially in a place like
New York where there were pretty heavy winters, so here
they were doing it themselves, you know, hiring seasonally to
make these traps. But they did create many things. I mean,
I think we all know some of the results of
their inventiveness, for example, the Victor mouse trap and the
(09:35):
Lazy Susan. I was so excited to learn that they
were responsible for this. It's made such a difference in
my life. Excellent piece of trivia, I think. Well, And
the interesting thing about the Lazy season Um, one of
the important things in the community was that mediocracy was key.
You were never supposed to be lazy, but you weren't
supposed to try to strive above all the others. And
(09:59):
I think it's maybe a little funny that the Lazy
Susan is the result of that, a convenience product at least.
But even though some inventions did stand out and some
adventures did stand out in this community community, that word
(10:21):
was still definitely the key. Even labor was social. They
would hold these bees to complete tasks in a timely
manner um. And maybe you can talk about the bees
a little more, Sarah, Yeah, I mean probably most people
are maybe familiar with quilting bees, that kind of thing
where everybody gets together and you make all the quilts.
You know, you have the tops piece together already, but
(10:43):
you go ahead and do the more boring work, which
is is attaching it to the bottom and putting in
the padding and everything. But they wouldn't do this just
for quilts. They would do it for any kind of
task that needed to be accomplished quickly. So for instance,
like bringing in the hay it's something you better do
before it rains heavily, or making these bags. You know,
they'd all get together. And the interesting thing about it is,
(11:06):
like you mentioned earlier, they really did emphasize the community aspect.
It was something that was supposed to be fun, not
just boring work if you're doing it yourself. And there's
even a quote from their second annual report where they
wrote that the task could be done quote at a
single stroke with all the enthusiastic, sportive feeling of a
(11:26):
game of ball. That does sound rather exciting, but it
does beg the question also, if a hayin bee is
as fun as a game of ball, then what is
downtime like in this community? And again we see that
it's really communal. The adults live in what is called
the mansion house, which was a three story modern home
complete with shared dining and living spaces. It's a pretty
(11:48):
handsome home actually still stands. Yeah, and it's interesting. One
of the perks of living in Oneida meant that because
of scale, the community could afford some things that other
people couldn't. They could afford luxuries like um furnaces and
heated drawing rooms, things that only wealthy people could afford
at the time. Yeah, because it is a mansion house,
it just has a lot of people living in it.
(12:10):
So we're going to take you on a little tour
of the home. Um, starting in the dining room, which
could hold the entire community. And I think this is
a really interesting thing they did to to ensure that
clicks wouldn't pop up in the dining room as they
always do, right, Yeah, the typical Yeah, you would take
your seat by your place in the serving line, so
(12:32):
I guess you could maybe jump the line to be
with your friend, but you would essentially be seated at random,
so so no favorites. After dinner. After dinner with with
any of your random community members, you would move on
to the big hall and have a meeting. And the
hall is sort of the center of the religious aspect
of this community too, But it doesn't look at all
(12:53):
like a church. It had paintings of justice and music
and astronomy and history, allegorical paintings, and it's also where
members would discuss their spiritual concerns and talk about community
concerns and then maybe relax a little too and enjoy
a concert. I think the community kept a band among
its members or some other kind of entertainment, and it's
(13:16):
quite the program. And if that program on any given
night was promising enough, maybe some tourists would stop by
pay about twenty five cents for an evening of grand entertainment.
So they build it. Yeah, but the gatherings in the
big hall, they weren't always that fun. So, for instance,
you wouldn't want to show up on a night where
(13:36):
they were doing quote mutual criticism, and on those nights
that's when everyone could basically air their grievances with everyone else.
Reminds me kind of a festivus, not to make a
comparison with a fake religion, but um, the mutual criticism
part is one of the strangest aspects of this to me,
that you would go face to face with these people
(13:58):
who you lived with and worked with every day, and
tell them what was wrong, which could be not only
you're not working hard enough to support the community, but
you're working too hard. You're going above and beyond, and
it's it's not you don't fit in. Yeah. It goes
back to that goal of mediocrity that you mentioned before.
(14:18):
So after getting some of these neighborly criticisms off your chest,
you might go on up to the upper sitting Room,
which was a well appointed salon where you could page
through some books like Charles Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drewd,
which I think you read recently. I read the spin off.
You read the spin off. Sorry, my mistake. They wouldn't
(14:39):
have read the spin off, probably not quite, but they
might have also read some bound copies of magazines like
Atlantic Monthly. Anyway, just your basic chill out space, take
some time off after the hanging, Yeah, and then it's
off to bed in your private room with a twin bed. Yeah.
And here's the kicker there. You would definitely be by
yourself when you we're going off to bed. And this
(15:02):
brings us to the complex marriage which he knew we
were going to have to talk about. Eventually, it's what
made the Onida community so infamous, and Noise believed that
for the community to live without sin, they would need
to quote mail marriage to the cross. So he was
against monogamous marriage, but he wasn't against sex. He was
(15:26):
actually quite in favor of it as long as it
took place between multiple partners. But he knew that there
was a potential problem with that, and that was that
complex marriage would soon produce a whole lot of kids,
more kids than the community could support. So he instituted
this practice that he himself had begun after his wife
(15:48):
had suffered from four premature births and death, and it
was he called it male continents, and it was basically
male birth control UM. He decided to do it himself
after her after her premature births UM. She was quite
understandably distraught over the death of those four kids, and
(16:08):
he decided that she shouldn't have to go through it again.
But he actually turns it into part of his philosophy
after that. It's not just something that happened personally to him.
He takes it and makes it part of the community.
So he separates sex into two components. Essentially, the pleasurable
aspect of it and the reproductive aspect and treats them
into entirely different ways. So, since Adam and Eveson, the
(16:30):
reproductive part had been dominant, but by taking the reproductive
aspect out of the picture, people would be free to
indulge in the more pleasurable part. So this is how
he saw it. Yeah, and this male continence idea that
he comes up with really does work pretty well for
the community as far as limiting the number of children born,
(16:50):
because between eighteen forty eight and eighteen sixty nine only
thirty one kids are born. And we're going to talk
a little bit more about kids in the community later,
But after they were weaned, they were raised communally in
this children's house by guardians. But there aren't just rules
about how people were supposed to have sex and not reproduced.
(17:12):
There were also rules about how the matchups even were made. Yeah,
And the main thing about these rules is that there
were no secrets, right. That was the essential component here.
For example, if you had sex with someone, it wasn't
even happening in a private room. Instead, you would go
to these small trysting rooms, is how they were known.
I think right off of the upper sitting room, and
(17:35):
you could essentially book a room for a few hours,
but everybody knew about it when you did. It seems
so awkward to they are right off the room. I
think one that is still in existence as a as
a show piece really is right off the sitting room
where everyone is hanging out. But really everyone already knew
(18:00):
who was matched up anyways, because couples had to be
approved by the Central Guidance Committee, which was made of
course of Noise and his family and other elders. And
they not only approved the couples, but they kept an
eye out for anyone that was getting too exclusive, because
that was of course at odds with the community's ideals. Yeah,
(18:22):
and other couplings were enforced and created by the committee itself,
which is kind of a strange idea. This is where
it gets a little disturbing. Yeah, Noise would initiate teen girls,
while his wife and sister would do the same for boys.
So this is one type of arrangement that was made
to sort of introduce these younger people into the system. Yeah,
(18:43):
and these these couples that were formed by the committee
not because of some other attraction. After the members hit
their twenties, they were usually allowed to choose have a
little more choice in who their partners were going to be.
But interestingly, it is this regulation surround ding not just sex,
but eventually child bearing that eventually signaled the beginning of
(19:04):
the end for the community. So Noise decided that it
seemed like the Kingdom of Heaven wasn't immediately on hand,
and he started thinking that maybe they should start having
more children and and beef up the numbers a little
bit and have the community grow. So he started to
approve natural reproduction, no longer using male continents. But there's
(19:28):
a catch, only the reproduction between partners that seemed to
be a good spiritual match with each other. Yeah, he
calls it Sturp culture. That's the name that he gave it,
and it basically says that only those with the highest
spiritual development will be allowed to reproduce. So couples would
have to apply to the committee and either be accepted, rejected,
(19:49):
or rematched with another person. And it was pretty successful.
Forty eight kids or fifty eight, depending on which you read,
were born between eighteen sixty nine and eighteen sevent nine.
Nine of those were Noise kids. Because of course, he
has the highest level of spiritual development. And one of
the strange things about this is, of course it is
(20:11):
very much inspired by eugenics. It's spiritual, but it is eugenics,
and he had read quite a bit about it and
was trying to emulate that. But obviously it read a
lot of hard feelings. In addition to children, there were
couples who were rejected, who felt jealous of the people
(20:32):
who did get to have children. Some of the new
parents were sad because they're forced to turn their kids
over to this communal upbringing. And so by eighteen seventy eight,
some of the younger community members were getting really tired
of it. They were getting fed up with being rejected
or matched with the people they didn't want, or having
to give up their kids, and they wanted romance and
(20:55):
monogamous marriage and family, and so some of them started
to pull up and leave the community, often when they
were rejected by the committee. And trouble was compounded by
noise passing on administration more and more to his son Theodore,
who was not very competent, and in eighteen seventy nine
(21:16):
he fled to Canada because he was faced with this
moral lawsuit, and it only took two months for the
community to end the practice of complex marriage and mutual criticism.
Can imagine maybe people are a little bit tired of that,
but it's interesting to see how how quickly it crumbles
with without him, it dissolved quickly. But it didn't end there, right,
(21:39):
not exactly after the community dissolved in a couple of months.
Within a year, they became a corporation, which is a
total surprise. Which was as a total shock, but I
mean when you look at it, they already had the
foundations for this and this share all things group. They
got together and decided that instead of property and partners,
they would share talk in business. Yeah, So they formed
(22:02):
the Oneida Community Limited, which was a joint stock company
that made silver plate. Because they were quite successful and
good in this manufacturing realm, and probably they were also
thinking they had invested their life's work into a community,
you want to get some kind of return on it,
even if it's in the form of stock. That sort
(22:24):
of goes against their their original community ideals. But Onida
Silver is of course still one of the most famous
American silver companies today. Of their motto. Interestingly, like I
checked out their website to see what they were what
they were offering these days, and their motto is bring
life to the table, which I'm probably reading too much
(22:45):
into that. And the mansion house is also still intact.
You can tour it, stay the night, and some people
even rent apartments there. Only one trusting room is still
left for show, however, the one I mentioned that is
really right off of the upper sitting room. And um,
I think maybe we could close out with this quote
(23:06):
from an Oneida expert. He's a historian, Robert S. Fogerty,
and he wrote quote, there's some who think Noise is
just a lecture, pure and simple. There are others who
believe that he was a great forward thinking individual who
is a great religious figure. I think it's fifty fifty
to be honest. Thank you so much for joining us
(23:29):
for this Saturday Classic SyncE. This is out of the archive.
If you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar during the course of the show,
that may be obsolete. Now. So here is our current
contact information. We are at History Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the
History all over social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
(23:52):
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works?
Dot com
Happy Saturday, everybody. We recently got an email from listener
Ellen who asked us to do a show about the
onidat Utopia, and that's one that's already in our archive
from back in tleven from our previous hosts Sarah and Babuina.
One of the things that's really strongly associated with the
Anida community was free love and complex marriages. And that
means that there is a little more sex talk, in
(00:23):
a little more candid sex talk in today's show than
you might typically associate with us. It might even be
a lot more so Happy listening, Welcome to Stuff you
missed in history Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello,
(00:46):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm
Deblina Chuckerboarding, and today we're gonna talk a little bit
more about free love. I mean, hopefully that makes you
keep on listening right away. But I was thinking about
it because we did a podcast a couple of weeks
ago on Victoria wood Hall, who was the first female
presidential candidate. And I don't know if you want to
give a quick recap of her beliefs on free love. Yeah,
(01:10):
she basically didn't believe free in free love in the
sense that everyone should be having sex with each other.
But she did believe that people should have the choice
whether or not to be together. So that was just
a little bit about it. You didn't have to be
stuck in a marriage if you didn't want to be. Now,
So we we had her on our minds. And then
also I co edited an article recently that Molly Edmonds
(01:33):
wrote one of the hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told
You on polyamory, and so it came up again, and
she actually even mentioned the Oneida Community in her article.
So both of those examples got me thinking about this community,
which is probably the most famous example of organized free
love in American history, and it is, of course the
(01:54):
Oneida Commune or Oneida Community in New York State. Yeah,
when I first started researching this with you, it seemed
almost too crazy to be real. I don't know, Maybe
I've just lived too sheltered a life. Maybe I'm alone
in this, but I don't know. Can you tell us
a little bit about some of these things? It does
sound too crazy to be real, And that's partly because
(02:15):
the people that made up this large Victorian community shared
not only property and labor, but of course sexual partners,
and they surprisingly earned boatloads of money through these really
successful marketing schemes. I think that's sort of the first
loop in this In this episode, they were actually quite
successful financially. Another potentially strange fact about them they regarded
(02:40):
the genders equally and they shared labor, so pretty surprising.
The ladies even more pantaloons. You can look up pictures
of them. They have short skirts and little pantaloons underneath.
And um. Then, maybe the strangest thing of all. Their
eventual undoing came about when this eugenics inspired breeding pro
Graham left the younger members yearning for good old fashioned
(03:03):
courtly love and and monogamous marriage. And for those of
you who own some fine Oneida silver, you might know
where it goes from there. The commune doesn't last forever,
much like a lot of other communes, even those that
are often considered to be the most successful in American history,
like Oneida. So who was behind this Oneida community in
(03:24):
the first place. This guy named John Humphrey. Noise and
it's not doesn't look like noise. It's n O y
E s. In case you want to look up this
guy a little more. But yeah, the commune and the
ideas behind it came from his ideas and preaching. And
he was born in eighteen eleven in Vermont. He was
a wealthy kid. He went to Dartmouth and then to
(03:45):
law school. Really seemed to be on the right track
to being a well off New England lawyer until he
attends a revival of evangelist Charles Finney in eighteen thirty one,
and at that point he decides to become a minister instead,
so big career change. But but even then he seems
like he was possibly on the track to becoming just
a well off New England minister instead of a lawyer.
(04:08):
He went to Andover Theological Seminary. From there he transferred
to Yale. But after that his ideas started to get
kind of out there, and definitely two out there. For Yale,
he believed in something called perfectionism, which was the idea
that after conversion we are free from sin, which obviously
(04:30):
that idea didn't sit very well with the Calvinist faculty
at Yale and they denied his ordination. Yeah, so just
to give you a little background on the beliefs that
he had. They extend from the central idea of Perfectionism,
and they're pretty controversial. He, for one thing, thinks the
Second Coming has come and gone already. In fact, he
thinks that happened in a d seventy at the destruction
(04:52):
of the Temple in Jerusalem. This meant that man didn't
have to wait for heaven to be one with God.
You could do it here on earth as well. But
to do so you had to leave the world and
live according to the laws of heaven, like maybe in
a commune run by noise. So he gets kicked out
of Yale, and he starts kind of meeting with other perfectionists,
(05:13):
learning the drill, talking to people going on the circuit,
and he decides, well, I'm going to start my own
group here, and he organizes the Bible Communists in Putney, Vermont,
in eighteen thirty six and preaches love and harmony to them.
And it's interesting to sort of get a look at
what type of people were joining this group, the Bible Communists.
(05:35):
They were mostly small town folks. They came from all
sorts of occupation, something that probably proved useful down the line,
and you know, maybe if it had stayed at this level,
it would have been pretty under the radar. You know,
a religious group that's too radical for Gale, but not
so radical that it doesn't fit in in some way
(05:55):
with all of the revivals sweeping the United States at
this time, then Noise shakes things up a little bit. Yeah,
he doesn't just keep it at that level. Just a
year after starting that group, Noise writes the so called
battle Axe Letter. And this letter it really gets the
public riled up. It stirs up a lot of controversy
because it advocates free love. Specifically, it says, quote, when
(06:20):
the will of God is done on earth as it
is in heaven, there will be no marriage. And his
rationale came from scripture. It came from Matthew, which says
for in the Resurrection, they neither marry nor are given
in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.
So Noise took this to mean that marriage should not
be exclusive. All men should be married to all women
(06:42):
and it's something called complex marriage. So this is definitely
an example of free love that's different from the one
we talked about in the Victoria Woodhole episode. Quite different
in fact, but the idea, just like Victoria Woodhell made
Noise in his followers incredibly in its corious and when
they actually start practicing complex marriage by eighteen forty six,
(07:05):
which is a little bit after they decide that they're
going to share all their property and all their belongings,
it does not sit well with their neighbors in Putney, Vermont,
not at all. And Noise is arrested for adultery because
he is married legally, and he jumps bail, and by
eighteen forty eight he and most of his followers DeCamp
for Oneida, New York. And there are a few other
(07:28):
satellite communities, but the main Oneada community is set up
there in New York and it lasts for another thirty years.
So we're gonna talk more about free love and that
aspect of the community later, but first, it's interesting to
figure out how these perfectionists Biblical communists actually made a living. Yeah, well,
(07:49):
at first they don't write the two hundred people that
live in this community. They try farming and logging. It's
a situation where men and women are sharing the same
rights and lay bur but the community isn't doing well
enough to support itself for the long term. So then
things start picking up eventually, though when they start manufacturing
(08:10):
things again into manufacturing work a little more reliable. Yeah,
So what sorts of things were they manufacturing. They were
canning and jarring veggies and fruit, also processing silk and printing.
They were milling grist mills and sawmills both and making
small goods like traveling bags. Yeah, and there. That was
all pretty successful for them. But the big win, the
(08:31):
thing that really made them sustainable, was the invention of
one of the community's members, a guy named Suel new House,
and he came up with a new kind of lightweight
animal trap for for animals, and the trap market at
the time was not so crowded that you couldn't have
a new a new trap birth through and so by
(08:53):
the mid eighteen fifties, they were making so many of
these traps, and they were selling them so well that
they had to hire on wade workers, which was kind
of at odds with their belief because they were not
only against slavery, they were also against wage labor, and
especially seasonal wage labor, because at this point people would work,
they'd have jobs during the summer, and then they'd get
(09:14):
laid off in the winter, especially in a place like
New York where there were pretty heavy winters, so here
they were doing it themselves, you know, hiring seasonally to
make these traps. But they did create many things. I mean,
I think we all know some of the results of
their inventiveness, for example, the Victor mouse trap and the
(09:35):
Lazy Susan. I was so excited to learn that they
were responsible for this. It's made such a difference in
my life. Excellent piece of trivia, I think. Well, And
the interesting thing about the Lazy season Um, one of
the important things in the community was that mediocracy was key.
You were never supposed to be lazy, but you weren't
supposed to try to strive above all the others. And
(09:59):
I think it's maybe a little funny that the Lazy
Susan is the result of that, a convenience product at least.
But even though some inventions did stand out and some
adventures did stand out in this community community, that word
(10:21):
was still definitely the key. Even labor was social. They
would hold these bees to complete tasks in a timely
manner um. And maybe you can talk about the bees
a little more, Sarah, Yeah, I mean probably most people
are maybe familiar with quilting bees, that kind of thing
where everybody gets together and you make all the quilts.
You know, you have the tops piece together already, but
(10:43):
you go ahead and do the more boring work, which
is is attaching it to the bottom and putting in
the padding and everything. But they wouldn't do this just
for quilts. They would do it for any kind of
task that needed to be accomplished quickly. So for instance,
like bringing in the hay it's something you better do
before it rains heavily, or making these bags. You know,
they'd all get together. And the interesting thing about it is,
(11:06):
like you mentioned earlier, they really did emphasize the community aspect.
It was something that was supposed to be fun, not
just boring work if you're doing it yourself. And there's
even a quote from their second annual report where they
wrote that the task could be done quote at a
single stroke with all the enthusiastic, sportive feeling of a
(11:26):
game of ball. That does sound rather exciting, but it
does beg the question also, if a hayin bee is
as fun as a game of ball, then what is
downtime like in this community? And again we see that
it's really communal. The adults live in what is called
the mansion house, which was a three story modern home
complete with shared dining and living spaces. It's a pretty
(11:48):
handsome home actually still stands. Yeah, and it's interesting. One
of the perks of living in Oneida meant that because
of scale, the community could afford some things that other
people couldn't. They could afford luxuries like um furnaces and
heated drawing rooms, things that only wealthy people could afford
at the time. Yeah, because it is a mansion house,
it just has a lot of people living in it.
(12:10):
So we're going to take you on a little tour
of the home. Um, starting in the dining room, which
could hold the entire community. And I think this is
a really interesting thing they did to to ensure that
clicks wouldn't pop up in the dining room as they
always do, right, Yeah, the typical Yeah, you would take
your seat by your place in the serving line, so
(12:32):
I guess you could maybe jump the line to be
with your friend, but you would essentially be seated at random,
so so no favorites. After dinner. After dinner with with
any of your random community members, you would move on
to the big hall and have a meeting. And the
hall is sort of the center of the religious aspect
of this community too, But it doesn't look at all
(12:53):
like a church. It had paintings of justice and music
and astronomy and history, allegorical paintings, and it's also where
members would discuss their spiritual concerns and talk about community
concerns and then maybe relax a little too and enjoy
a concert. I think the community kept a band among
its members or some other kind of entertainment, and it's
(13:16):
quite the program. And if that program on any given
night was promising enough, maybe some tourists would stop by
pay about twenty five cents for an evening of grand entertainment.
So they build it. Yeah, but the gatherings in the
big hall, they weren't always that fun. So, for instance,
you wouldn't want to show up on a night where
(13:36):
they were doing quote mutual criticism, and on those nights
that's when everyone could basically air their grievances with everyone else.
Reminds me kind of a festivus, not to make a
comparison with a fake religion, but um, the mutual criticism
part is one of the strangest aspects of this to me,
that you would go face to face with these people
(13:58):
who you lived with and worked with every day, and
tell them what was wrong, which could be not only
you're not working hard enough to support the community, but
you're working too hard. You're going above and beyond, and
it's it's not you don't fit in. Yeah. It goes
back to that goal of mediocrity that you mentioned before.
(14:18):
So after getting some of these neighborly criticisms off your chest,
you might go on up to the upper sitting Room,
which was a well appointed salon where you could page
through some books like Charles Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drewd,
which I think you read recently. I read the spin off.
You read the spin off. Sorry, my mistake. They wouldn't
(14:39):
have read the spin off, probably not quite, but they
might have also read some bound copies of magazines like
Atlantic Monthly. Anyway, just your basic chill out space, take
some time off after the hanging, Yeah, and then it's
off to bed in your private room with a twin bed. Yeah.
And here's the kicker there. You would definitely be by
yourself when you we're going off to bed. And this
(15:02):
brings us to the complex marriage which he knew we
were going to have to talk about. Eventually, it's what
made the Onida community so infamous, and Noise believed that
for the community to live without sin, they would need
to quote mail marriage to the cross. So he was
against monogamous marriage, but he wasn't against sex. He was
(15:26):
actually quite in favor of it as long as it
took place between multiple partners. But he knew that there
was a potential problem with that, and that was that
complex marriage would soon produce a whole lot of kids,
more kids than the community could support. So he instituted
this practice that he himself had begun after his wife
(15:48):
had suffered from four premature births and death, and it
was he called it male continents, and it was basically
male birth control UM. He decided to do it himself
after her after her premature births UM. She was quite
understandably distraught over the death of those four kids, and
(16:08):
he decided that she shouldn't have to go through it again.
But he actually turns it into part of his philosophy
after that. It's not just something that happened personally to him.
He takes it and makes it part of the community.
So he separates sex into two components. Essentially, the pleasurable
aspect of it and the reproductive aspect and treats them
into entirely different ways. So, since Adam and Eveson, the
(16:30):
reproductive part had been dominant, but by taking the reproductive
aspect out of the picture, people would be free to
indulge in the more pleasurable part. So this is how
he saw it. Yeah, and this male continence idea that
he comes up with really does work pretty well for
the community as far as limiting the number of children born,
(16:50):
because between eighteen forty eight and eighteen sixty nine only
thirty one kids are born. And we're going to talk
a little bit more about kids in the community later,
But after they were weaned, they were raised communally in
this children's house by guardians. But there aren't just rules
about how people were supposed to have sex and not reproduced.
(17:12):
There were also rules about how the matchups even were made. Yeah,
And the main thing about these rules is that there
were no secrets, right. That was the essential component here.
For example, if you had sex with someone, it wasn't
even happening in a private room. Instead, you would go
to these small trysting rooms, is how they were known.
I think right off of the upper sitting room, and
(17:35):
you could essentially book a room for a few hours,
but everybody knew about it when you did. It seems
so awkward to they are right off the room. I
think one that is still in existence as a as
a show piece really is right off the sitting room
where everyone is hanging out. But really everyone already knew
(18:00):
who was matched up anyways, because couples had to be
approved by the Central Guidance Committee, which was made of
course of Noise and his family and other elders. And
they not only approved the couples, but they kept an
eye out for anyone that was getting too exclusive, because
that was of course at odds with the community's ideals. Yeah,
(18:22):
and other couplings were enforced and created by the committee itself,
which is kind of a strange idea. This is where
it gets a little disturbing. Yeah, Noise would initiate teen girls,
while his wife and sister would do the same for boys.
So this is one type of arrangement that was made
to sort of introduce these younger people into the system. Yeah,
(18:43):
and these these couples that were formed by the committee
not because of some other attraction. After the members hit
their twenties, they were usually allowed to choose have a
little more choice in who their partners were going to be.
But interestingly, it is this regulation surround ding not just sex,
but eventually child bearing that eventually signaled the beginning of
(19:04):
the end for the community. So Noise decided that it
seemed like the Kingdom of Heaven wasn't immediately on hand,
and he started thinking that maybe they should start having
more children and and beef up the numbers a little
bit and have the community grow. So he started to
approve natural reproduction, no longer using male continents. But there's
(19:28):
a catch, only the reproduction between partners that seemed to
be a good spiritual match with each other. Yeah, he
calls it Sturp culture. That's the name that he gave it,
and it basically says that only those with the highest
spiritual development will be allowed to reproduce. So couples would
have to apply to the committee and either be accepted, rejected,
(19:49):
or rematched with another person. And it was pretty successful.
Forty eight kids or fifty eight, depending on which you read,
were born between eighteen sixty nine and eighteen sevent nine.
Nine of those were Noise kids. Because of course, he
has the highest level of spiritual development. And one of
the strange things about this is, of course it is
(20:11):
very much inspired by eugenics. It's spiritual, but it is eugenics,
and he had read quite a bit about it and
was trying to emulate that. But obviously it read a
lot of hard feelings. In addition to children, there were
couples who were rejected, who felt jealous of the people
(20:32):
who did get to have children. Some of the new
parents were sad because they're forced to turn their kids
over to this communal upbringing. And so by eighteen seventy eight,
some of the younger community members were getting really tired
of it. They were getting fed up with being rejected
or matched with the people they didn't want, or having
to give up their kids, and they wanted romance and
(20:55):
monogamous marriage and family, and so some of them started
to pull up and leave the community, often when they
were rejected by the committee. And trouble was compounded by
noise passing on administration more and more to his son Theodore,
who was not very competent, and in eighteen seventy nine
(21:16):
he fled to Canada because he was faced with this
moral lawsuit, and it only took two months for the
community to end the practice of complex marriage and mutual criticism.
Can imagine maybe people are a little bit tired of that,
but it's interesting to see how how quickly it crumbles
with without him, it dissolved quickly. But it didn't end there, right,
(21:39):
not exactly after the community dissolved in a couple of months.
Within a year, they became a corporation, which is a
total surprise. Which was as a total shock, but I
mean when you look at it, they already had the
foundations for this and this share all things group. They
got together and decided that instead of property and partners,
they would share talk in business. Yeah, So they formed
(22:02):
the Oneida Community Limited, which was a joint stock company
that made silver plate. Because they were quite successful and
good in this manufacturing realm, and probably they were also
thinking they had invested their life's work into a community,
you want to get some kind of return on it,
even if it's in the form of stock. That sort
(22:24):
of goes against their their original community ideals. But Onida
Silver is of course still one of the most famous
American silver companies today. Of their motto. Interestingly, like I
checked out their website to see what they were what
they were offering these days, and their motto is bring
life to the table, which I'm probably reading too much
(22:45):
into that. And the mansion house is also still intact.
You can tour it, stay the night, and some people
even rent apartments there. Only one trusting room is still
left for show, however, the one I mentioned that is
really right off of the upper sitting room. And um,
I think maybe we could close out with this quote
(23:06):
from an Oneida expert. He's a historian, Robert S. Fogerty,
and he wrote quote, there's some who think Noise is
just a lecture, pure and simple. There are others who
believe that he was a great forward thinking individual who
is a great religious figure. I think it's fifty fifty
to be honest. Thank you so much for joining us
(23:29):
for this Saturday Classic SyncE. This is out of the archive.
If you heard an email address or a Facebook U
r L or something similar during the course of the show,
that may be obsolete. Now. So here is our current
contact information. We are at History Podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the
History all over social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
(23:52):
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works?
Dot com
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com