April 4, 2011 • 24 mins
In 1848, a preacher named John Humphrey Noyse founded the Oneida community. 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm doubling and chuckerboarding, and today
we're going to talk a little bit more about free love.
I mean, hopefully that makes you keep on listening right away.
(00:22):
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, 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
(00:43):
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. Yeah, So we we had
her on our minds. And then also I co edited
an article recently that Molly Edmonds wrote one of the
hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told You on polyamory, and
(01:04):
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 Oneida Commune or Onada
community in New York State. Yeah, when I first started
(01:26):
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 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
(01:51):
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 the genders equally and they shared labor,
so pretty surprising. The ladies even wore pantaloons. You can
(02:12):
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 program left the younger members yearning for good
old fashioned courtly love and and monogamous marriage. And for
(02:34):
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 Ohneida. So who is behind this
oi a community in the first place. This guy named
John Humphrey. Noise and it's not doesn't look like noise,
(02:56):
it's n O y e s in case you want
to look up this guy 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 law school. Really seemed to be on the
right track to being a well off New England lawyer
(03:17):
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. He went to andover theological seminary.
From there he transferred to Yale. But after that his
(03:41):
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 that idea didn't sit very well
with the Calvinist faculty at Yale, and they denied his ordination. Yeah,
(04:03):
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 of the Temple in Jerusalem. This meant that man
didn't have to wait for heaven to be one with God.
(04:24):
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,
learning the drill, talking to people going on the circuit,
and he decides, well, I'm going to start my own
(04:45):
group here, and he organizes the Bible Communists in Putney,
Vermont in eighty 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, the Bible Communists.
They were mostly small town folks. They came from all
sorts of occupation, something that probably proved useful down the line.
(05:09):
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 Gail, but not
so radical that it doesn't fit in in some way
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
(05:31):
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
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
(05:56):
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,
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
(06:18):
in fact, but the idea, just like Victoria Woodell, made
Noise and his followers incredibly notorious. And when they actually
start practicing complex marriage by eighteen forty six, 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
(06:40):
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 satellite communities,
but the main Onada community is set up there in
New York. It last for another thirty years. So we're
(07:02):
gonna talk more about free love in 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,
at first they don't write the two hundred people that
live in this community. They try farming and logging. It's
(07:22):
a situation where men and women are sharing the same
rights and labor, 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 things,
they get into manufacturing work a little more reliable. So
what sorts of things were they manufacturing. They were canning
and jarring veggies and fruit, also processing silk and printing.
(07:46):
They were milling gristmills and sawmills both and uh, making
small goods like traveling bags. Yeah, and there. That was
all pretty successful for them. But the big win, the
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
(08:07):
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 burst through. And so by
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 wage workers, which was kind
(08:27):
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
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
(08:50):
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
Lazy Susan who 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 Susan Um one of
(09:13):
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
I think it's maybe a little funny that the lazy
Susan is the result of that a convenience product. But
even though some inventions did stand out and some inventus
(09:36):
did stand out, in this community community, that word 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
(09:58):
make all the quilts. You know, you have the tops
piece together already, but you go ahead and do the
more boring work, which is is um attaching it to
the bottom and putting in the padding and everything. But
they wouldn't do this just for quotes. 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
(10:20):
making these bags. You know, they'd all get together. And
the interesting thing about it is, 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
(10:42):
all the enthusiastic, sportive feeling of a 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
(11:04):
dining and living spaces. It's a pretty handsome home actually
still stand. 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,
(11:25):
because it is a mansion house, it just has a
lot of people living in it. So we're gonna take
you on a little tour of the home. Um, starting
in the dining room, which would 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
(11:49):
in the serving line, so 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,
(12:10):
but it doesn't look at all like a church. It
had paintings of justice and music and astronomy and history,
allegorical painting, 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
(12:32):
other kind of entertainment, and it's 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
(12:53):
up on a night where they were doing quote mutual criticism,
and on those nights that's when everyone could basely air
their grievances with everyone else. Her minds 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
(13:15):
face to face with these people 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. So after getting some of
(13:38):
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 have read
the spin off, probably not quite, but they might have
(14:00):
also read some bound copies of magazines like Atlantic Monthly. Anyway,
just your basic chill out space. Take some time to
n off after the hanging, 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 were going off to bed. And this
(14:21):
brings us to the complex marriage, which you knew we
were going to have to talk about eventually. It's what
made the Onanta community so infamous, and Noise believed that
for the community to live without sin, they would need
to quote nail marriage to the cross. So he was
against monogamous marriage, but he wasn't against sex. He was
(14:44):
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 support. So he instituted this
practice that he himself had begun after his wife had
(15:06):
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 birth UM. She was quite understandably
distraught over the death of those four kids, and he
(15:27):
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
(15:48):
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,
(16:09):
because between eighteen forty eight in eighteen sixty nine, only
thirty one kids they're born. And we're gonna 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.
(16:31):
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 Trystane rooms. Is how they were known,
I think, right off of the upper sitting room, and
(16:53):
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 fitting room
where everyone is hanging out. Um, but really everyone already
knew who is matched up anyways, because couples had to
(17:14):
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,
and other couplings were enforced and created by the committee itself,
(17:37):
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, and these these couples that were formed
by the committee, not because of some other attraction. After
(18:00):
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
surrounding not just sex, but eventually child bearing that eventually
signaled the beginning of the end for the community. So
Noise decided that it seemed like the Kingdom of Heaven
(18:21):
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 a catch. Only the reproduction between
(18:41):
partners that seemed to be a good spiritual match with
each other. Yeah, he calls its strip 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, reject died, or rematched with
another person. And it was pretty successful. Forty eight kids
(19:06):
or fifty eight, depending on which you read, were born
between eighteen sixty nine in eighteen seventy 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 very much
inspired by eugenics. It's spiritual, but it is eugenics, and
(19:28):
he had read quite a bit about it and 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
who did get to have children. Some of the new
parents were sad because they're forced to turn their kids
(19:50):
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
monogamous marriage and family, and so some of them started
(20:10):
to couple 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
he fled to Canada because he was faced with this
moral lawsuit. And it only took two months for the
(20:34):
community to end the practice of complex marriage and mutual criticism.
Can imagine maybe people were 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, not exactly after the community dissolved in a
(20:54):
couple of months. Within a year, they became a corporation,
which is a total surp which was as a total shock,
but I mean, when you look at it, they already
had the foundations for this and the Share All Things group.
They got together and decided that instead of property and partners,
they would share stock in business. Yeah, so they formed
the Oneida Community Limited, which was a joint stock company
(21:17):
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
of goes against their their original community ideals. But Oneida
(21:39):
Silver is, of course still one of the most famous
American silver companies today. 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 into that.
And the mansion house is also still intact. You can
(22:01):
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 from an Oneida expert.
He's a historian, Robert S. Fogerty, and he wrote quote,
(22:23):
there's some who think noise is just a lecturer, 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. So UM,
I mean, I'm sure that you guys are going to
have an opinion on on noise and the Anona community,
(22:44):
and um, maybe you have family members who were a
part of it. I actually read that many of the
people who go and stay at the mansion house today, UM,
in the hotel or tour it did have ancestors who participated. UM.
Or if you just have some some Oneida silver and
(23:04):
let us know, um what you think about the history
of the company. UM. You can email us at history
podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on
Twitter at Misston History, and we're on Facebook. I'm definitely
expecting some feedback on this episode. Yeah, I can't imagine
that people won't have some strong opinions about that. But
(23:25):
if you want to learn a little bit more about
some of the ideas related to those that we've talked
about here, you can check out Molly Edmonds article on
how polyamory works by visiting our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com
(23:46):
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today on iTunes. You do
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm fair Dowdy and I'm doubling and chuckerboarding, and today
we're going to talk a little bit more about free love.
I mean, hopefully that makes you keep on listening right away.
(00:22):
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, 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
(00:43):
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. Yeah, So we we had
her on our minds. And then also I co edited
an article recently that Molly Edmonds wrote one of the
hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told You on polyamory, and
(01:04):
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 Oneida Commune or Onada
community in New York State. Yeah, when I first started
(01:26):
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 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
(01:51):
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 the genders equally and they shared labor,
so pretty surprising. The ladies even wore pantaloons. You can
(02:12):
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 program left the younger members yearning for good
old fashioned courtly love and and monogamous marriage. And for
(02:34):
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 Ohneida. So who is behind this
oi a community in the first place. This guy named
John Humphrey. Noise and it's not doesn't look like noise,
(02:56):
it's n O y e s in case you want
to look up this guy 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 law school. Really seemed to be on the
right track to being a well off New England lawyer
(03:17):
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. He went to andover theological seminary.
From there he transferred to Yale. But after that his
(03:41):
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 that idea didn't sit very well
with the Calvinist faculty at Yale, and they denied his ordination. Yeah,
(04:03):
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 of the Temple in Jerusalem. This meant that man
didn't have to wait for heaven to be one with God.
(04:24):
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,
learning the drill, talking to people going on the circuit,
and he decides, well, I'm going to start my own
(04:45):
group here, and he organizes the Bible Communists in Putney,
Vermont in eighty 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, the Bible Communists.
They were mostly small town folks. They came from all
sorts of occupation, something that probably proved useful down the line.
(05:09):
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 Gail, but not
so radical that it doesn't fit in in some way
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
(05:31):
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
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
(05:56):
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,
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
(06:18):
in fact, but the idea, just like Victoria Woodell, made
Noise and his followers incredibly notorious. And when they actually
start practicing complex marriage by eighteen forty six, 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
(06:40):
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 satellite communities,
but the main Onada community is set up there in
New York. It last for another thirty years. So we're
(07:02):
gonna talk more about free love in 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,
at first they don't write the two hundred people that
live in this community. They try farming and logging. It's
(07:22):
a situation where men and women are sharing the same
rights and labor, 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 things,
they get into manufacturing work a little more reliable. So
what sorts of things were they manufacturing. They were canning
and jarring veggies and fruit, also processing silk and printing.
(07:46):
They were milling gristmills and sawmills both and uh, making
small goods like traveling bags. Yeah, and there. That was
all pretty successful for them. But the big win, the
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
(08:07):
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 burst through. And so by
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 wage workers, which was kind
(08:27):
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
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
(08:50):
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
Lazy Susan who 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 Susan Um one of
(09:13):
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
I think it's maybe a little funny that the lazy
Susan is the result of that a convenience product. But
even though some inventions did stand out and some inventus
(09:36):
did stand out, in this community community, that word 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
(09:58):
make all the quilts. You know, you have the tops
piece together already, but you go ahead and do the
more boring work, which is is um attaching it to
the bottom and putting in the padding and everything. But
they wouldn't do this just for quotes. 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
(10:20):
making these bags. You know, they'd all get together. And
the interesting thing about it is, 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
(10:42):
all the enthusiastic, sportive feeling of a 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
(11:04):
dining and living spaces. It's a pretty handsome home actually
still stand. 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,
(11:25):
because it is a mansion house, it just has a
lot of people living in it. So we're gonna take
you on a little tour of the home. Um, starting
in the dining room, which would 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
(11:49):
in the serving line, so 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,
(12:10):
but it doesn't look at all like a church. It
had paintings of justice and music and astronomy and history,
allegorical painting, 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
(12:32):
other kind of entertainment, and it's 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
(12:53):
up on a night where they were doing quote mutual criticism,
and on those nights that's when everyone could basely air
their grievances with everyone else. Her minds 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
(13:15):
face to face with these people 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. So after getting some of
(13:38):
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 have read
the spin off, probably not quite, but they might have
(14:00):
also read some bound copies of magazines like Atlantic Monthly. Anyway,
just your basic chill out space. Take some time to
n off after the hanging, 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 were going off to bed. And this
(14:21):
brings us to the complex marriage, which you knew we
were going to have to talk about eventually. It's what
made the Onanta community so infamous, and Noise believed that
for the community to live without sin, they would need
to quote nail marriage to the cross. So he was
against monogamous marriage, but he wasn't against sex. He was
(14:44):
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 support. So he instituted this
practice that he himself had begun after his wife had
(15:06):
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 birth UM. She was quite understandably
distraught over the death of those four kids, and he
(15:27):
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
(15:48):
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,
(16:09):
because between eighteen forty eight in eighteen sixty nine, only
thirty one kids they're born. And we're gonna 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.
(16:31):
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 Trystane rooms. Is how they were known,
I think, right off of the upper sitting room, and
(16:53):
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 fitting room
where everyone is hanging out. Um, but really everyone already
knew who is matched up anyways, because couples had to
(17:14):
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,
and other couplings were enforced and created by the committee itself,
(17:37):
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, and these these couples that were formed
by the committee, not because of some other attraction. After
(18:00):
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
surrounding not just sex, but eventually child bearing that eventually
signaled the beginning of the end for the community. So
Noise decided that it seemed like the Kingdom of Heaven
(18:21):
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 a catch. Only the reproduction between
(18:41):
partners that seemed to be a good spiritual match with
each other. Yeah, he calls its strip 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, reject died, or rematched with
another person. And it was pretty successful. Forty eight kids
(19:06):
or fifty eight, depending on which you read, were born
between eighteen sixty nine in eighteen seventy 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 very much
inspired by eugenics. It's spiritual, but it is eugenics, and
(19:28):
he had read quite a bit about it and 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
who did get to have children. Some of the new
parents were sad because they're forced to turn their kids
(19:50):
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
monogamous marriage and family, and so some of them started
(20:10):
to couple 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
he fled to Canada because he was faced with this
moral lawsuit. And it only took two months for the
(20:34):
community to end the practice of complex marriage and mutual criticism.
Can imagine maybe people were 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, not exactly after the community dissolved in a
(20:54):
couple of months. Within a year, they became a corporation,
which is a total surp which was as a total shock,
but I mean, when you look at it, they already
had the foundations for this and the Share All Things group.
They got together and decided that instead of property and partners,
they would share stock in business. Yeah, so they formed
the Oneida Community Limited, which was a joint stock company
(21:17):
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
of goes against their their original community ideals. But Oneida
(21:39):
Silver is, of course still one of the most famous
American silver companies today. 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 into that.
And the mansion house is also still intact. You can
(22:01):
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 from an Oneida expert.
He's a historian, Robert S. Fogerty, and he wrote quote,
(22:23):
there's some who think noise is just a lecturer, 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. So UM,
I mean, I'm sure that you guys are going to
have an opinion on on noise and the Anona community,
(22:44):
and um, maybe you have family members who were a
part of it. I actually read that many of the
people who go and stay at the mansion house today, UM,
in the hotel or tour it did have ancestors who participated. UM.
Or if you just have some some Oneida silver and
(23:04):
let us know, um what you think about the history
of the company. UM. You can email us at history
podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on
Twitter at Misston History, and we're on Facebook. I'm definitely
expecting some feedback on this episode. Yeah, I can't imagine
that people won't have some strong opinions about that. But
(23:25):
if you want to learn a little bit more about
some of the ideas related to those that we've talked
about here, you can check out Molly Edmonds article on
how polyamory works by visiting our homepage at www dot
how stuff works dot com For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com
(23:46):
To learn more about the podcast. Click on the podcast
icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The
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