SYMHC Live: The New Harmony Utopias

We did a live show for the Indiana Historical Society about the town of New Harmony, Indiana in the window from 1815-1827. In that period, two different communal societies occupied the town, one right after the other. But one was far more successful.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson
and Tracy. We recently went on a little trip. We did,
we didn't. We visited the Indiana Historical Society at their invitation,

(00:23):
we did a live podcast there we did. That show
actually took place the night before their Midwestern Roots Conference
began UH and it was such an honor to kick
off the festivities and they being in Indianapolis. They asked
us to do something Indiana related and we ended up
talking about the village slash town of New Harmony and

(00:43):
a couple of interesting communal living experiments that were conducted there. Yes,
we did not get to go to New Harmony while
we were there. It was a very fast trip, but
there are lots of things about it online. You can
have a lot of experience through all of these documents
and records and pictures and cool stuff. Yeah, the Indiana

(01:04):
Historical Society UM has a really impressive digital archive online,
including things not just about New Harmony but about a
lot of different topics. So we encourage people to absolutely
go explore, but for now we'll hop her right into
our live show. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Today we're talking

(01:26):
about the town of New Harmony, and in the window
from eighteen fifteen to eighty seven, there were two communal
society attempts there in the town, one right after the other,
one way more successful than the other. But to talk
about all that, we actually have to start in the
eighteenth century in Germany and talk about George Rapp. George

(01:50):
Rapp was born Johann George Rapp on November one, seventy
seven in Iptingen, which is in the Duchy of Wurtemburg, Germany,
and as he was growing up he learned to be
a weaver. He got married to Christina Benzinger in seventeen
eighty three, and then they had a son named Johannes,
who went more often by John later on, So when

(02:12):
we talk about John, that's who that is. And they
also had a daughter named Rosina. Yeah, Unfortunately we don't
know a whole lot about Rosina. Um I can't imagine
why her one of her children shows up a little
bit later in the record. We won't talk about her
in this podcast, but her offspring becomes a little bit
more important to the story. But we really don't know

(02:34):
much about their daughter. But by the seventeen eighties, Rap
had kind of moved away from textiles as a vocation
and into his growing religious passion and he had started preaching. Uh.
He was Lutheran in terms of his upbringing, but he
ended up becoming a Pietist, and in very simplistic terms,

(02:54):
that is an ideology that focuses on the individual's religious
experience as guided by the Bible. And the movement of
Pietism really began out of this perception of shortcomings of
the Church and its doctrine and the formality of it
and its followers. Pietisms followers really believed that there needed

(03:15):
to be reformation within the church so that they centered
theology again on truly living a Christian life and looking
to the Bible as the one true authority rather than
any sort of hierarchy put together by the Church. Yes, so,
because of this conflict between the established church and his
personal beliefs, Rap ultimately separated from the Lutherans in Sight five.

(03:36):
And he didn't go by himself. He had a small
group of followers who started meeting at his home, which
this was the eighteenth century in Germany that was not legal,
and their numbers got bigger over time, even though they
were having these illicit religious meetings. By the early seventeen nineties,
this little, the little, their little gatherings as they had grown,

(03:58):
had become very concerning to the church. And the church
was worried about this separatist group and the influence they
were having, and they considered it to be undermining the
social order. And rap also believed that he was a
prophet uh, something which he stated openly, and that was
essentially a pretty big piece of rebellion against the established

(04:21):
Lutheran Church. And he was actually brought before a church
commission in sevente charges of heresy, and in his testimony
he said to them quite plainly, quote, I am a
prophet and I am called to be one. Uh. He
was imprisoned briefly, so that's how that worked out. Um.
But this actually had the opposite of the commission's desired

(04:42):
effect in imprisoning him. More people started to take notice
of him, and as a consequence, his followers just grew
in number. So in an effort to control this problem.
They told Rap in seventeen eighty nine that he needed
to submit a formal statement of faith, and that instruction
didn't I actually come from the church. It came from
the government of Wurtemburg. Because the church in the state

(05:04):
were really deeply interconnected, as was the case and so
much of Europe at that point. That was actually one
of the things that Rapp and his followers really objected to. Yeah,
the writing that Raps submitted. He did make his formal declaration,
but it was really not what the government or the
church was looking for. Uh. Rap took advantage of this moment,
said you want to know what I think, Here's what

(05:25):
I think. So he stated quite clearly that while he
respected the government, he was very respectful. He was like,
I get it. But my followers and I who started
calling themselves the Harmonists, you'll also see that UH mentioned
as the Rappites, and we used those two terms pretty
interchangeably in this this episode. They felt that people should
just have freedom to form their own congregations as they wished,

(05:47):
without the involvement of any civic body or rules from
the government. And additionally, though his statement indicated that the
Harmonists really didn't have a whole lot of use for
some pretty standard social norms and customs that were part
of of government and church practice. So they didn't want
to baptize infants because they believed in believer baptism later

(06:07):
in life. Uh. They also did not believe in serving
in the military, so that was another big problem. You
can imagine how that went over Over the next four years,
the relationship between the Lutheran government of Wurtemburg and George
Rapt just became increasingly tense, and then in eighteen oh three,
rap was questioned one more time. This time the authorities

(06:28):
told him that he was not allowed to speak outside
of his town. That seems like an odd instruction, but
they're thinking was that he had converted everybody that he
was going to persuade within the town, so if they
could just stop him from going to find new people,
it would at least stop the spread of this dangerous rhetoric. Yeah,

(06:50):
it's an interesting it's thing, But he was so defiant.
They kind of knew he wasn't going to stop preaching,
so they were like, just don't go outside city limits. Um,
I feel like those were like rules my parents gave
menture don't go outside city limits. We won't. We won't
pick you up from the jail anywhere but town. Um. Look,

(07:13):
I was a wild child, Um. But this was the
end of life in Germany for rap so he set
out for the United States. He landed in Philadelphia in
October of eighteen o three, and he had a son,
John with him, as well as two other men who
were part of his separatist group, kind of scouting the
situation out. So this show is about new Harmony here

(07:35):
in Indiana. But the village in Indiana was not the
first rap Bite settlement in the United States, and this
precursor that they started with was the template that Rapp
and his followers used to establish the Indiana Harmony. So
we're going to talk about how it came to be
founded and what those rules were, because then they carry
over to new Harmony here. And the choice of the

(07:57):
US for this new settlement was based on raps interpretation
of the Bible, the passage in Revelation twelve six, which
reads quote and the woman fled into the wilderness, where
she had a place prepared for God had convinced him
that the unsettled land in North America was where he
and his followers should make their new home. Rapid hoped

(08:17):
that he could either get a land grant from the
US government or a provision for the purchase of some
discounted land. He did not really understand the process involved.
This was well before things like the Homestead Act that
made it a lot easier for people to get land.
Congress had to approve either of those options. Rap did
not anticipate that as being part of it, and he

(08:40):
wasn't really dissuaded when he found it out. He had
been hoping though, that, like even though people were telling him, no,
Congress has to do that for you, honey, um, but
he was hoping that he really had something special going
on and that he could be given a parcel of
land to start his community without having to mess with
all that red tape. And so his his big idea

(09:02):
was that he was going to go straight to President
Thomas Jefferson, which he did. He went and spoke with
Jefferson on July twelfth of eighteen o four, and he
explained his plans in the situation and what he had
come from. And while the President thought this whole conversation
was pretty compelling, he also deferred to Congress, and he
clarified for Rap that that was the only governing body

(09:25):
that could grant him land. UH. Jefferson did, though, use
his influence. He wrote some letters so that there would
be an offer of land and that offer would be protected. Uh.
He had give it made sure that Rap had this
option to purchase a forty thou acre township here in Indiana.
Rap did not have enough money for that one at
the time. UH, so that one did not happen. So

(09:45):
part of the reason that Rap was willing to take
his request directly to the President was because he needed
to get things settled as quickly as possible. He had
nothing to send him back to Germany. He had nothing
to return to their His estate had been seen eased
by the Wurtenburg government and he was considered to be
a fugitive, so he could not just go back, and

(10:06):
he didn't want to. Uh. He only had those few
people with him when he traveled to North America, but
he had already written back to Germany that was like
I am never coming back. UM. He didn't want to
return to Europe at all. He really thought like he
was where God wanted him to be. And he also
in those letters spoke about the potential of the U
S settlement, and as a consequence, more of her his

(10:26):
followers were already on the way. Uh They were ready
to set up this new utopia, and they started arriving
in Baltimore aboard the ship Aurora on July four, eighteen
o four, and two more groups of Harmonists followed in
the next six weeks aboard the Atlantic and the Margaretta.
So that meant he had an urgent need to have
a home for all these new arrivals, and without the

(10:48):
assistance that he was hoping for from the US government,
so Rap wound up purchasing several thousand acres of land
north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in Butler County. That cost him
a little more than ten thousand dollars, and he had
decided that Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, or Maryland would all be
good options for where they could set things up, but

(11:08):
this particular piece of land was not his first choice
of location. Nevertheless, though, the Harmonists pulled all of their
resources to try to make a go of it, and
they finalized that purchase on December twenty, eighteen o four.
Not everybody was pleased with this particular Pennsylvania land, though,
and some folks did leave Wraps group and go strike

(11:29):
out on their own. On February of eighteen o five,
Rap officially founded the Harmony Society that became the governing
body of the town that he founded, Harmony, Pennsylvania, and
the Society maintained all of their documents in the official
language of the Society as designated by George Rapp, which
was German. He was like, we'll talk about this more

(11:52):
in a minute, but like Christ is coming you guys,
we don't have to learn another language. We're good. Uh
literally really he was like, don't let's not waste time
with that. Like we're just let's keep what we know.
This is going to be more efficient. Um. He also
established himself sort of in this this document as the
ultimate leader. And when you start looking at biographies of

(12:14):
Rap and stories about him and how his society worked,
he is characterized in two very very different ways. There
are somewhere he is described as as very benevolent and
loving father figure. Uh, you know, kind of like a
hippie love figure that wants to start a cool community everybody. Um.
And then in others he's really represented much more as

(12:37):
a manipulative dictator who's like, well, I'm going to America
because Europe is not going to happen for us. You'll
die if you stay, you should come. Um. Probably those
are two sides of the same coin, and he may
have been both of those things, depending on who he
was dealing with and what topic was at hand. But
in all matters, no matter whether they were just the

(12:57):
logistics and finances of the community or matters of faith,
or how members of the group would interact with outsiders,
including how they voted later on, rap was deferred to.
He made all the decisions and his word was absolutely final.
So if you signed on to Harmonies Articles of Association,
you relinquished all personal assets to the community and you

(13:20):
promised to live by the communities rules. The number of
initial members who first signed on with this charter was
first established. That estimate varies different accounts site, anywhere from
thirty one to a hundred families. So that was as
many as four dred to five hundred people. Yeah, some
were like tracking by families, some were trying to tract
by individuals, and I think that leads to some confusion

(13:42):
in what those numbers really were, but after that initial
charter was established, any new prospective members had to agree
to a trial period, which was usually like six to
eight weeks before they could become full members. And the
charter initially included a provision for any members who left
the group that were in good standing to be given
a sum of cash when they left, so that they

(14:03):
were getting a little something back of what they had
put in, and also they could start their life elsewhere
without having to go from zero. We're going to talk
about what happened to that little plan later, because they
didn't work out so good. I bet you can get
so the groups quickly set to work. They cleared about
a hundred and fifty acres of land in just the
first year, they built an estimated fifty log homes plus

(14:26):
a mill, and of course at church there was also
a committee of elders hand chosen by WRAP to help
lead the adjustment into more communal living. I feel like
this is the first place that they really diverge from
all the utopian communities that we have ever talked about,
and that they actually showed up and got some things done. Yeah,
and there was a transition team. Like I I like

(14:48):
the idea that They recognized that these people were all
part of a group in Germany, but they weren't accustomed
to this idea of like, we all lived together in
one big community and share of resources. So he did
have people that were like, here, we're going to get
you through this transition, which is probably why his communities
worked better than some others. Um two years into this
communal living effort, the Harmonists, in pace with the Second

(15:12):
Great Awakening, which was sweeping through the US, had their
own reawakening. Beginning in eighteen o seven. The belief among
Raps followers that Christ was soon to return to Earth
took on a much more immediate tone. Rap had come
to the conclusion that the Napoleonic Wars, which had started
in eighteen o three, were a sign of the eminent

(15:34):
return of the Son of God, and that was because
he saw Napoleon Bonaparte as an anti Christ. I said
this to Holly while we were planning this episode. But
we just got back from Paris not long ago, and
we saw Napoleon's tomb, and I was unprepared for uh Napoleon,
who you know, We've always learned as a guy that

(15:55):
we had a lot of wars with in a giant
tomb surrounded by angel statues. France definitely did not think
he was an antichrist. Um. So wrap thought that this
guy's rise to power really signaled the end of Europe
in the world order. Yeah, that was one of the
many reasons he was like, Europe was not gonna exist

(16:16):
for long. Come on, um. Mysticism was also a huge
part of the Rabbite interpretation of scripture, So George Rapp
and his followers, But again, he was always really leading
the ideology. We're always watching world events. He was kind
of a news junkie UM, and they were watching events
closely to see what they might portend. Because he was
always relating what was going on around them and throughout

(16:38):
the world to what was in the Bible and trying
to kind of parse out any deeper meaning he could.
And the group often discussed these matters as part of
their religious practice. It would basically have like evening services
in discussion where they would talk about, Hey, this thing
happened over here, this might mean this um tying all
of these various events like we said to biblical prophecy.
So the Rabbites were linealists. They believed that the Son

(17:02):
of God was going to appear once again in human
form and then rule the world as his kingdom for
a thousand years of peace, and that this was going
to start at any moment. So they sought to purify
themselves in preparation. So soon there was no tobacco use
in harmony, raps followers shifted to a celibate life. The

(17:22):
end times are coming. You don't need to have any babies. Uh.
Prior to this decision for celibacy, there had been a
number of marriages in harmony, and and Georgia's son John
had actually been one of the last to get married
in harmony. But even married couples were encouraged to abstain
from sexual activity and to live as brothers and sisters
of faith. So John Ramp incidentally clashed with his father.

(17:46):
Uh during this jime. The cartoon that just ran in
my head was like if one of my parents pulled that,
like a world of no jan and Ron, This isn't
gonna happen. Um. But yeah, So John and George had

(18:07):
some problems, uh, and John left harmony. He moved to Ohio,
and he and his father, George later became embroiled in
a legal battle over the money that John had contributed
to Harmony to the trust, which he wanted back, and
several other members that had decided that they were going
to leave joined this suit seeking their money as well,

(18:29):
all of them after kind of having this drag out
for a while because it seemed like they were not
in good standing per George's assessment, thus they were not
entitled to that. But they eventually abandoned legal action. They
just got tired of fighting and they gave up on
ever reclaiming their assets. But John did go back and
rejoin his father's community, although it was not for terribly

(18:52):
long because he died when he was still a very
young man in his late twenties, and that happened in
eighteen twelve. We will get right back to our New
her Any live show at the Indiana Historical Society in
just a moment, but first we're going to pause and
have a quick sponsor break. So George Rapp was setting

(19:15):
up this whole thing. The idea was that the Millennium
was coming, and there were naturally gonna be some expenses
related to the second coming. Rap knew they might have
to travel to New Jerusalem with all of his followers
so that they could meet Christ and present themselves. Uh.
And that was just one for another. There were concerns
that there was going to be global instability leading up

(19:36):
to this prophecied return that might put them in a
position where it would be uh pretty good to have
some ready cash, a little financial liquidity to get through.
And the Harmonists also wanted to have money to help
support this new world order. So to that end, a
fund was started for donations in coin uh. And that
was a fund that Rap managed almost entirely on his own. Uh.

(20:01):
So while sexual activity and other pleasures were completely denounced,
financial success was a okay um seen in a completely
different light, the logic being that it could be used
in service of faith. And this is the second way
that these folks are totally different from every other utopian
experiment we've ever talked about. Like money's cool, I'm gonna

(20:21):
have a lot of it. So, even as the Harmonists
became more and more settled in Butler County, there were
some conflicts that arose. Rob was really think of thinking
of other locations that might be better, and as early
as eighteen o six he was submitting new request to
the government for different land. And one of the things
that he and the Harmonists had wanted when they had

(20:41):
immigrated from Germany to North America was to cultivate vineyards
and orchards. And this Pennsylvania land that they were on
was just not working out in that regard. And it
was also not in a spot where exporting anything that
they did grow could be done at the level that
they needed to keep growing. They were just a little
bit too geographically isolated, and he thought they weren't going

(21:05):
to continue flourishing if they stayed there. Yeah, that land
was near a river, but it was a very shallow river.
They it was not really like going to support heavy
duty irrigation, and they couldn't start shipping things. And additionally,
as the area around that settlement grew more populated, the
Harmonists found that, for one, their new neighbors really did
not understand their community, and they were particularly suspicious of

(21:28):
how wealthy the Harmonists seemed to be. Um. They did
not live like poppers. They had nice things. Um, you know,
people that visited would comment on how beautiful everything was
and how you know, well appointed the rooms were and stuff.
So Um. The Rabbites also had this little problem where
they refused to participate in the War of eighteen twelve
and the disregarded draft notices. They were fined for it,

(21:51):
and they paid those fines, but other people in the
state really started to regard them with a lot of distrust.
So in eighteen fourteen they may the decision to head
west after rapids sent a group out scout for some
possible new locations, and the Indiana Territory offered a better
climate for the crops that they wanted to grow. They
could get a bigger piece of land than they had

(22:12):
back in Butler County, uh and Harmony, Pennsylvania. The whole
thing was sold to a Mennonite named Abraham Ziegler, who
paid one hundred thousand dollars for it in eighteen fourteen.
Y'all that's more than he bought the land for. Yes,
but he had improved it. I feel like we just

(22:35):
did history property hunters. But I don't like the color.
I don't do you guys watch shows and get frustrated
by those people that don't know that paint is real.
Just paint the room. It makes me crazy. Um So
in eighteen fifteen, New Harmony, Indiana was officially founded on

(22:57):
the Wabash River as an assie. You will often see
this discuss simply as harmony without the new That was
rap sentent to just call it harmony again, but the
new got added over time to distinguish between the two
locations uh and in reference to vote the first and
second settlements. Depending on what document you look at, sometimes
harmony has a Y and sometimes in I e. Just

(23:18):
f y I if you go looking so wrapping the
Harmonists put a lot of work to turn this river
riverfront land, which at that point was unsettled, into a village.
They felled trees again and cut them into lumber to
use for construction. They dug out clay from the ground
to make bricks for the same purpose. It was really
arduous work, and first they had to build kind of

(23:39):
a presettlement for everybody to live on. While they were
building the larger village, they also established farmland and they
were able to cultivate that vineyard and the fruit crops
that they had been wanting the whole time. So Father
Wraps home was in the center of town and everything
kind of radiated out from it. There were four dormitories
built adjacent to it, each of which could house sixty

(24:01):
eight residents. Uh, there were also individual homes and each
street had a water well and an oven that were
there for communal use. And there were common use plants
like herbs that were grown in public spaces and anyone
could just come and take them as needed. Of course,
there were some difficulties in this move. Malaria was still
really common in parts of the US at this point,
so malaria another disease, claimed the lives of a significant

(24:25):
number of harmonists in that first year and then for
in the first years in Indiana, a cemetery had to
be established a lot sooner than they were planning to
have to deal with these mortalities. And I think that's
super fascinating to me about the cemetery is that it
is on the site of native mounds that date back
to the Middle Woodland period. So there was like two
thousand year old mounds where the cemetery went. Yeah, we

(24:49):
didn't we don't know what the logical to the best
of my knowledge. Um, but as this new community began
to grow, rap was pretty smart in that he knew
that to survive they needed to dive sify, and uh,
they wanted to do this so that they could ensure
their ongoing financial stability as well. So this was a
lesson that they had learned when they were in Pennsylvania,

(25:10):
where he eventually saw that the growth and commerce potential
of the settlement they had there was finite, and he
did not want the same thing to happen again. So
their agricultural efforts were geared not towards subsistence farming where
they might sell any extra, but to both providing the
food the community needed and having enough produce to sell.
They also established mills to process cotton and wool and

(25:32):
uh again for their clothes, but also they were making
enough to trade. These were essentially little factories, and this
made Harmony, Indiana p prosperous. Yeah, And this prosperity was
really in part due to this new location. They weren't
in a place that was heavily populated when they got there.
This was essentially frontier land, which the US had gained

(25:54):
possession of in the eight ten o four Treaty of Vincennes,
which read, in part the said Delaware Trial for the
considerations here and after mentioned relinquishes to United States forever
all their right and the title to the tract of
country which lies between the Ohio and Wabash rivers and
below the tracks seeded by the Treaty of Fort Wayne
and the road leading from Benson's to the Falls Falls

(26:16):
of Ohio. So this of course was all part of
the larger series of treaties that affected this whole part
of the us UH to let the government take land
that had been previously inhabited by native people's, which also
continued long after we're talking about today. So this is
all sort of going on at the same time as
all the stuff that we're talking about. Yeah, so the

(26:38):
nearest town at this point was more than thirty miles away,
so there was not a lot of competition for traveler
business when people moved through the area and might need
to trade or purchase supplies to get them ready to
keep going wherever they were headed. And additionally, the settlement
was right there on the river, so they started shipping
their manufactured goods from that point of departure, establishing a

(26:59):
very wide reaching retail business. All run on a communal
model where everyone contributed. So while the men generally saw
to the agricultural efforts, the women and children worked in
the mills and workshops producing dry goods. So they had
gotten to Indiana in eighteen fourteen, and that meant that
the Rabbites were really setting up their home and their
business settlement at the same time that Indiana was transitioning

(27:22):
to statehood. It became the nineteenth US state at the
end of eighteen sixteen, so the residents of Harmony were
basically able to get into the ground floor, so to speak,
of this new state economy. In addition to the fruits
and the vegetables that they were growing and selling, the
town's general store had clothing and shoes, cold weather, cold
weather gear, saddles and bridles, and plows and wagons, anything

(27:47):
else that somebody might need. Yeah. It was pioneer target um.
And people went in they only needed shoes, but they
came out with like so much stuff. They had somebody
following you around, like do you need a cart? Do
you need a No, I don't need a car. If
you give you a cart, I'm buying everything. Yeah. But

(28:08):
the town also produced beer, wine, and whiskey, which could
be purchased at the general store, or you can enjoy
it in the town tavern, which they had also built.
Harmonists were not anti alcohol, but they were very much
anti drunkenness. The whiskey that they produced, for example, was
not something any of them drank, uh, it was for
other people. They occasionally had wine, but the rest of

(28:29):
the alcoholic beverages that they produced were strictly commercial. The
Harmonists of the town could just ask for anything that
they needed without paying for it because their participation, their
participation in the community entitled them to it. But really,
at least in terms of food, there wasn't a whole
lot that the Harmonist households needed at the general store.
As part of the establishment of the community, every home

(28:51):
was set up to have its own gardens. There was
poultry and a cow for each household, and as we mentioned,
there were also public access gardens near the dormitories. But
outsiders of course coming through who had to pay, and
on occasion those outsiders found the prices a little bit high,
and they were kind of resentful that not everybody had
to pay for stuff. Uh. The idea of communal living

(29:13):
in this way was completely alien, and they sometimes felt
like they were being treated poorly. Additionally, people certainly noticed
that while the Harmonists were perfectly happy to sell hard liquor,
they were not willing to drink it. Uh. And this
led to some interesting discord because there were customers like
in the tavern that kind of just felt like they
were being judged, like I'm gonna sit here and have

(29:36):
a whiskey and there would just be people staring at them,
just not how I enjoy a vodka. So I understand.
So all this commerce was largely the work of Frederick
Reicher Rap, which was George Wrap, George wraps adopted son.
George had understood the need for diversification, but it was

(29:56):
really Frederick who managed all these various enterprises that is
making the community really profitable. The profits were used to
purchase additional land and expanding New Harmony's footprint and enabling
more crops to be planted for future commerce. Uh. Frederick
was Wrapped right hand and all these business dealings. And
it had been Frederick who had stayed behind in Harmony

(30:17):
of Pennsylvania to wrap up the business affairs there after
George had moved on and Indiana. He was in charge
of both the commerce and the political rate relationships with outsiders. Yeah.
So when county officials had asked Rap to send a
representative from his group to the state Constitutional Convention in
eighteen sixteen. It was naturally Frederick who has chosen. This

(30:38):
was also in part because Frederick was one of the
few people who had learned a bit of English um truly,
so he could go. His English was allegedly not fantastic,
but he could get along um and he was assigned,
interestingly enough for a pacifist group to the committee that
drafted the section of the Constitution that related to the
militia um. This actually really worked out though, because, as

(31:00):
it was due to his influence, that wording was included
at that point to allow uh conscientious objection to the
bearing of arms, with a provision to pay a fee
for exclusion from the draft. And just as had been
the case in Pennsylvania, the refusal of the Rabbites to
participate in military service kind of rankled their neighboring communities.

(31:20):
Around the same time, New Harmony was growing pretty rapidly
and they needed more able bodies to run all these
manufacturing enterprises, and to meet that demand, the requirements of
religious devotions started relaxing a little bit. Frederick Rapp was
appointed as one of the commissioners of the State Bank
of Indiana, and this shift of focus to commerce was

(31:43):
particularly upsetting for a number of the Harmonists. Their society
had been founded entirely on their faith, with their commercial
interests always framed as being necessary to support that faith,
but now it seemed less and less like that was
the case. There was an ebb and flow in New
harm He's population in the late eighteen teams as a
number of people left. New immigrants arrived from Germany and

(32:05):
replaced them, but the acceptance of new members turned out
to be completely unsuccessful. Rap later wrote that the newcomers
were quote too wild for our congregation, uh, and that
he was and this is a quote, sick and tired
of them, um. And he had actually been paying for
the passage from Germany for some people who had written

(32:28):
and said that they wanted to join the community, but
he put an end to that practice. He also stopped
the existing members of the community from writing home to Germany,
being like the US is great, you guys, um He
because people were saying like, I have found a better
life here. You can come and you know, to family
members and friends, you could come and be part of this.
And he was like, please stop doing that. We can't, um,

(32:49):
can't do that. He wanted people of faith, and most importantly,
people so faithful that they would obey him in whatever
he said. Uh, and he just could not trust any
newcomers who live up to his high standard of what
exactly that meant. So even for the new members who
were devout enough for George Rap's taste, it just wasn't easy.
Members who had been with the Harmonists since eighteen o

(33:11):
five were pretty judgmental of the newer members, and factions
started to form of the old and new groups. In
eighteen eighteen, George Rapp revised those articles that have been
established thirteen years prior when the Pennsylvania Settlement began in
an effort to address the destabilization that was taking place,
and two major changes came from this revision. So first,

(33:33):
all records of how much any given person had contributed
to the community upon their entry into it were destroyed.
The intent was that the old and the new factions
would stop bickering about who was more valuable to the
community and who had like given more and deserved more. Uh. Second,
that provision for those choosing to leave to get a
cash grant upon their exit was stricken from the charter

(33:57):
because as people were wanting to leave. He was recognizing
that he couldn't just keep giving bushels of money away.
So at the same time as these internal issues were
plaguing New Harmony, there was also mountain friction with their neighbors.
At this point, immigrants who had been in the US
for a while and the first generation of European descendants
to be born on US soil started to view immigrants

(34:19):
new immigrants is potentially destructive to what they had built.
Little ironic uh and Raps community had a number of
things working against it as this settlement grew. So for
one thing, or as this sentiment grew rather, I'm sorry
uh for I think it was self isolating. So most

(34:41):
of the members still only spoke German. They refused to
bear arms, and that group was wealthy enough to pay
the penalty required to exempt them from military service, whereas
most people could not have afforded it. They also commanded
just a huge chunk of the area's financial capital, and
they seemed impervious to the various shifts in the market
that negatively impacted the communities around them. And they weren't

(35:05):
having children, so they weren't helping to build the US population.
A justice had been the case back in Pennsylvania. Rap
and the Harmonists were facing increasing resentment from the locals
and dealing with their own fractures within the commune, so
they decided to leave. They left all their hard work
in New Harmony, Indiana, to start all over again. Raps
still believed that the second coming was eminence. He wanted

(35:28):
to regroup, reset the community with the focus of preparing
for that. And in the decade that they spent here
in Indiana, rapping As people had really built something considerable.
So they had not only raised such varied crops as sugarcane, wheat, hemp, cotton,
and flax, among others, they had also built that general
store and in various specialty shops, textile mills, tanneries, and distilleries.

(35:52):
They were producing three thousand galons gallons of whiskey for
sale each year and harvesting thousands of bushels of things
like potatoes, rye, and oats. And they had started importing
sheep from Spain to make fine woolens and they were
able to get into a textile market that previously had
only included wool fabric that was imported from Europe. But

(36:14):
then in twenty four, New Harmony was sold to a
man named Robert Owen for another selling of an entire
town in this story, uh, and the Harmonists left Indiana. Okay,
So before we get into the next phase of New
Harmony's history, we're going to take another little break and
hear from one of the sponsors that keep stuff you
missed in history class going. Robert Owen was born on

(36:43):
May fourteenth of seventeen seventy one in Newtown, Montgomery, Share, Wales.
I have probably said that incorrect for the Welsh people.
His parents, Robert Owen and and Williams, had six other
children in addition to Robert and. As a child, Owen
moved to London and he became a cloth years of
print us at the age of ten, and in that
job he had access to his employer's vast library of books,

(37:05):
which he loved. He also really excelled in the textile industry,
and before age twenty he was already running a large
Manchester cotton mill that went on to great success under
his leadership. And through his success he started making little
efforts into the idea of communal living. And his first
such work started when he convinced his bosses to purchase

(37:27):
some mills in the Scottish village of New Lanark, which
was a really impoverished community, and Robert Owen wanted to
improve the quality of life for everyone in New Lanark,
so he worked on initiatives to make the housing they're
safer and cleaner, and to educate the children in the
area as well as the adults, and he was mindful

(37:47):
of the welfare of the workers in the mills he managed.
When the mills closed for several months during the War
of eighteen twelve, he actually made sure that the workers
continued to get paid during that time. Naturally, things like
this really endured him to the people he employed, but
his business partners not so much. Disagreements over this led
Robert Owen to breaking from his established job and starting

(38:10):
his own company in eighteen thirteen. The stockholders and his
new venture were pretty like minded. They were content to
take a smaller share of the profits so that the
money that was made could be put towards benevolent benevolent projects,
and soon they bought out his old partners. Uh And
one of the drivers in Owens's work was actually his

(38:31):
attitude towards religion. He thought that all established religions were
really problematic, and he thought that people's circumstances had greater
influence over their behavior and their lives than any church
ever could, and so he thought that if everyone's circumstances
were improved, the world would just become a better place.
And he was working to make New Landard an example

(38:53):
of how that ideology worked, and as a consequence, the village,
which was pretty successful in his efforts, was sited and
studied by everyone from royals to philosophers. He kept working
on bettering the lives of people in the village, particularly
the children, and he wanted to extend that beyond the town.
He lobbied among manufacturers to reduce the number of hours

(39:15):
that children worked that was initially voted down. He also
opened Great Britain's first kindergarten in New Landard in eighteen sixteen,
called the Institution for the Formation of Character. And all
of this was really like a slow burned build up
to lead oh into the idea of communal living. And
he thought particularly that if unemployed workers displaced by machinery

(39:38):
in the Industrial Revolution just had safety and security and
a reasonable standard of living, a lot of the world's
ills would be cured. Like he saw it as a
pretty obvious chain of events, like people are without work,
they don't have money, they turned a crime, or they
just fall on hard times and they suffer, and we
could prevent all of that. Uh. He envisioned these villages

(39:59):
that were designed for the this idea where family oriented
dormitories existed, that had commonary areas where people could cook
and socialize, and children would stay with their parents the
first three years, but then be raised by the collective
and then everyone would work as they were able to
keep the whole thing going, including agricultural work to provide food.
So Owen had actually made contact with New Harmony four

(40:22):
years before he took possession of it. He had written
to George Rapp with this series of questions about how
the rapbite utopia was functioning. He had done that in
eighteen as his ideas of these communities to prevent poperism
were forming in his head. So when George Raps Harmonists
were ready to sell, Owen was ready to buy. And
he already knew that the Harmonist village had been profitable.

(40:44):
After writing a number of essays about how communal society
could succeed. He was ready to take possession of this
whole town and prove it. And additionally, he had his
own problems that were making it pretty appealing to leave
home and strike out in a new place. UH. Outspoken
anti religion stance had really strained relationships with his business partners,

(41:05):
as well as his wife, who was very religiously devout. Uh.
I can't imagine that marriage. UM. And his work in
New Landard was actually hitting some problems as well. There
had been a typhoid outbreak, which was really kind of
scandalous for a town that was touted as having impeccable cleanliness. Uh.
And there was a dispute over pay rates that was brewing.

(41:26):
And part of the problem was that as Owen had
gotten more and more obsessed with creating a new utopia,
he had grown more and more distant from that company
town that was his first experiment in socialized society. Owen
paid a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars for New Harmony,
and that purchase was final in early January of Robert
Owen was really eager to get to work. Five of

(41:48):
his children, which included four sons and a daughter, traveled
to Indiana to help their father, and as spring arrived,
Owen offered a life in the community to anyone who
cared to join and then embrace its ideals of equality
and communal living. Yep, open invitation. That sounds smart. What

(42:08):
could go wrong? Also, we're going to return to the
ideas of equality in a village. Yeah, not so much so.
His new town had come with a hundred and eighty buildings,
but they were pretty quickly kind of packed to the
guilds because a lot of people wanted in on this opportunity.
But almost from the beginning things went wrong. For one,
Owen continually bad mouthed established religion, which made a lot

(42:30):
of the newcomers really uneasy. He was a dedicated follower
of Enlightenment thinking, and he wanted to essue tradition in
favor of forging all new paths, which was another unpopular
position that made people a little nervous. Uh. And he
tended to appeal to the upper class for financing and support,
and he misjudged the willingness of the u S upper
classes to participate in such an experiment, particularly an experiment

(42:54):
like this that had no ties whatsoever to religion. Spoke
openly against it. In fact, he did find some help
in the form of William McClure, who was a Scottish
born merchant who also believed in social reform and ultimately
did invest heavily in New Harmony. McClure offered his own
funds to the development of New Harmonies schools and engaged

(43:14):
some of the most respected educators of the day to
teach there. I mean, the school has had a really
amazing reputation. McClure also paid for the school's labs to
have scientific equipment and other necessities. Yeah. I feel like
there could be a whole side show just about the
people that he brought. UM. We don't talk about it
nearly enough in this one because it's about the whole
whole story, but there were some great people doing cool things. UM.

(43:37):
Owen had created a foundation document called Rules for a
Good Community in that outlined what he thought was necessary
to create inequality based society. UM. Incidentally, our lovely hosts
have this digitized online UM, as well as many many
other fabulous documents that are really really UM we're really

(43:58):
helpful to me in doing research for this, but also
just are fascinating to look through. UH. So Owen's Owen's
I keep wanting to put an s on his name.
He's just Owen um. Owen's rules were pretty lengthy, but
they set up some very important ideas, including the fact
that the financial accounts of the community should be maintained
by a chosen treasurer who reported to a committee on
all transactions, and that all of those financial records needed

(44:20):
to be open for anyone in the community to go
and review if they wanted to. Robert Owen's rules also
set up different departments to manage things like manufacture, policing, health,
and education. Things like that these divisions would be run
by subcommittees. Skillful practical men from the community with expertise
in any of these areas could be engaged by the

(44:41):
appropriate subcommittee for assistance. But really, despite all these plans,
Owen's utopia was a lot harder he found to execute
in reality than it had been on paper. For one,
even though it was going to be a society of equals,
there were some pretty clear class distinctions. Wealthy people had
moved there to the draw of this life among the intelligentsia,

(45:03):
and working people had moved there for a chance to
have a better life and everybody thought it was going
to be equal, but the reality was that those two
groups rarely mixed. They kind of chose instead to self
segregate along wealth lines. There wasn't a relinquishing of personal
wealth in Owen's group like there had been in Wraps,
So this class structure had just followed everyone into New Harmony.

(45:25):
The working class was resentful of wealthier inhabitants and ability
to contribute to the labor that was needed to sustain
such a place. No structure was ever fully implemented that
the community couldn't really become self sufficient, so the group
was floundering while Owen was continuing to put his own
money into trying to keep it afloat even on uneven footing.

(45:47):
I feel like we should mention that there were some
efforts really to make New Harmony into a community um.
Owen's children in particular, did a lot of things. His
son William started a Thespian society so that they could
have arts and and people could go see plays whenever
they wished. Uh. The school system is really what flourished though.
Children had both academic curriculum and training and trades, but ultimately,

(46:10):
when it came down to it and things really were
obviously not going to work out. Owen blamed McClure and
the educational set up for tanking the community. Owen gave
one last address to the community on May six of
eighty seven, and in it he said that McClure system
only reinforced class distinctions instead of erasing him. There had
been some debate over whether he was favoring children that

(46:32):
were from wealthier families with better opportunities um. Owen also
thought there was too much creativity in the curriculum and
not enough morality education, and he basically told everyone his
school ideas had been superior to McClure's and if they
had just done it his way, they could have sustained
the town class his heart. Long story short, this did

(46:57):
not go all that well. By the time Robert Owen
decided to end his involvement in this utopian dream, he
had lost eight of his personal fortune. He went on
to participate, but in a much less central way and
other utopian experiments, but he eventually focused a lot more
on activism and the establishment of trade unions. Yeah, he
really became like a labor activist, which kind of seemed

(47:19):
like it should have been his thing from the get go,
but he he learned a lot in the process. Um,
if you are wondering what happened to the Rabbits and
their leader after they left Indiana, they moved as planned
and started a new settlement, returning to Pennsylvania to do it.
That new home was called Economy, uh, and it was
where George Rapp lived out the rest of his life.

(47:41):
And just as they had grown New Harmony into a
massive and profitable enterprise, Economy had investments in railroads and
the oil industry, and their export business reached dozens of
states and ten countries. So they just kept on going
with that money thing. Fascinates me because so often the
story is and then they ran out of money and
everyone got sick and moved away. Even though they were

(48:06):
very financially successful, it was not entirely smooth. Rap and
his adopted son, Frederick, who he had relied on so
heavily since the beginning of the Harmonist time in the
United States, started to have disagreements about planning for the
financial future of the community. That caused a lot of
fracturing within the group and a lot of tension. Yeah,

(48:26):
when they started to think about like there was also
this problem where people were realizing, like, um, what a
christ is, Um, we're not having kids and we're getting
older and there's some problems. Like they started to realize
this was not working out. Rap died in eighteen forty

(48:48):
seven at the age of eighty nine. And remember that
collection fund that he started the early years of his
community because they wanted to have funds so they could
deal with travel needs to Jerusalem and any k us
that ensued. When he died, he had amassed half a
million dollars that he kept in a vault under his bedroom. Um.

(49:09):
He had withdrawn all of the harmonists money from banks
because he feared a banking collapse, So he was just
literally sitting on top of a pile of money. I
feel like that that wasn't an unjustified fear, But at
the same time, that's a lot of money to have
in a vault under your bedroom. I would dig it.

(49:31):
The Rabbike community continued, but without its charismatic leader, it
couldn't really sustain things long term. Soon members of the
group were questioning some of those things they had agreed to,
in particular that celibacy situation that also meant that they
hadn't expanded their community by starting families, and without Rap
driving that whole ideology, they also weren't bringing in new members,

(49:54):
so just the math was not in their favor long term.
In the twenty years after Rap died, the group rank
down to about two hundred and fifty members, and from
there it continued to diminish right up until the dawn
of the twentieth century. In nineteen o three, the town
of Economy was sold by a representative of the remaining
Rabbites for several million dollars UH. In nineteen o five,

(50:15):
the U. S. Supreme Court issued judgments on the last
of the disputed Rabbite assets at Economy, and within a
year the Harmonist movement was completely a matter of history.
As for the people who had landed in the failed
utopia of Robert Owen, one particular aspect of their efforts
really did take hold and survived. The educators that McClure
had brought in called the Boatloaders because the ship most

(50:38):
of them traveled onto the United States had been nicknamed
the Boatload of Knowledge, which I love, uh they have.
I think that's a good T shirt. We should do
boatload of knowledge. Shirt is a good one. Uh, they stayed.
They created this enclave of science and education that persisted,
persisted for long after Owen was gone. Yeah. McClure, as

(51:00):
as you guys probably know because you're you live near here,
was really known for his knowledge of geology, and he
really started some interesting stuff in New Harmony in terms
of like teaching geology and establishing labs there and uh,
pretty long tale for him of his legacy. As a consequence, UM,

(51:21):
in nineteen sixty five, New Harmony became a National Historic District.
Many sections of the town have been restored to their
Rabbite era versions, and the village's famous hedge labyrinth was
restored in nineteen forty, much to the to the delight
and sometimes confusion of tourists who choose to enter. Um As,
So those people who go visit, that's I have not
gotten to go to New Harmony. That's the one thing

(51:42):
I want to see. Um. I will get lost in
that labyrinth and maybe never come out. But that is
our New Harmony tale for the days. Our very deepest
thanks to Lauren Picktele and Mary Angeline and everybody at
the Indiana Historical Society who made this of it so
much fun for us. Yeah, they were all just absolutely delightful,

(52:04):
and it's a place that is so turned on by history.
Everyone that works there is really excited to share history
with the people that come and visit. And we absolutely
had so much fun just getting to run around there
for just a few minutes before our show really happened,
and and it was very invigorating, Like it's one of
those things that makes me go like, histories in good

(52:25):
hands were good if you are in that area or
near that area, I mean, I recommend paying a visit.
In addition to their Indiana History exhibits that they have
for various things, they also have just done a whole
lot of work collecting oral histories and making exhibits about
those oral histories and making sure that those oral histories

(52:47):
reflect all the people in Indiana. Yeah, there was an
Asian Experience in Indiana exhibit that was there when we
were there, and they were talking about ones in the
past once coming up. Really cool. Yeah, there, you are
definitely driven by inclusivity and and a really like broad
approach to history and including everyone in it. We also

(53:08):
want to give us special thanks to the listeners who
came to the event early as part of a meet
and greet option that we had. We had so much
fun talking to them and everyone was so lovely. So
thank you, thank you, thank you Indianapolis for having us,
and for everyone that we interacted with for being just
an utter delight. Do you have a little listener mail
to takes out from all this? I do, and it's
actually live show themed A little bit um. It is

(53:32):
from our listener, Anna, who sent this incredibly cool card
on a map note which is a map of the
Seattle area, and then on the back she wrote us
a little note sure, Dear Holly and Tracy, greetings from Seattle.
I have been a fan of the show for five
plus years now, and my husband and I were lucky
enough to attend your Halloween themed live show on Safety

(53:53):
Coffins in Seattle last year, which was super fun. It
was a great crowd, she said. My macab sense of
humor was delight did and I was so glad to
hear you answer my question on what historical figure would
you take with you to Disney World. I don't know
that that made it into the live show, but in
case anyone's curious, it's the easiest prediction for me, ever,
I wanted to sit between Marie and Twinette and Queen

(54:16):
Victoria in a doom buggy and go through Haunted Mansion
because I thought their reactions would be really funny. Uh.
And I goes on to say, I came across an
interesting article in Bust magazine this month about stage coach
Mary Fields, the first African American woman to become a
mail carrier in the United States, and I thought you
might enjoy, so she included that for us. She says,

(54:36):
as always love your podcast and stay curious. Thank you
so much, Anna. That was so sweet, um, and what
a lovely follow up to a show we did months
and months ago, but was super fun. I love doing
live shows through the funnest for sure. If you would
like to write do as, you can do so at
History Podcast at how Stone works dot com. You can

(54:56):
also find us everywhere on social media as Missed in History,
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(55:18):
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