Secular Utopias in America: New Harmony, the North American Phalanx and Arden

Utopian or intentional communities are places where people chose to live together around a shared vision of how society should work. They fall into two kinds: religious utopias and secular utopias. A secular utopia is built on a social theory or principle — housing as a human right, a single tax, egalitarianism — and sometimes on more than one. Religion was not banned in them; it simply was not the organizing idea.

Three secular communities show how differently the idea played out.

New Harmony, Indiana

New Harmony as Robert Owen imagined it. Engraving by F. Bate, London, 1838.

Robert Owen, a Welsh manufacturer and social reformer, came to the United States in 1825 to build his ideal society. His economic theory, Owenism, first meant to end the poverty of factory workers in Great Britain, aimed at a community where everyone lived equally well.

• In 1824 the Harmonists (or Rappites) put their town of Harmony, Indiana, up for sale. Owen bought it and invited anyone to join him. Its 180 buildings, with room for eight hundred people, filled quickly.
• New Harmony was meant to support itself and never did. For its two years, the fortunes of Owen and his business partner kept it going.

Equality in principle, not in practice. Owen spoke for equality regardless of class or gender, but he looked down on working-class people and on anyone without a formal education.

• He favoured communal self-government but, distrusting elections and the less educated, never set one up. The town had no government; decisions were argued out in public debates, which grew abusive as the classes turned on each other — some ended as shouting matches in the street, one with Owen himself on his feet shouting for kindness.
• He treated farmers and mechanics as people to be rescued from their way of life, believing that making them live like the upper class would push them to the next stage of evolution. He set rules for music, food and courtship, and a dress code for men and women, all modelled on the East Coast scientists and educators he admired.
• In 1826 he opened an infant boarding school: children left their parents from as young as two and lived together until five, when they moved on to the next boarding school.

The working-class members refused the rules and resented Owen for them, and that rejection did much to sink the community. What lasted was education: leading scientists lectured there, and the schools outlived the experiment by several decades.

The end. In 1826, urged on by Owen's business partner, the members skilled in farming and manufacturing began to break away. Owen and his partner then sued each other over their losses, and the experiment collapsed. New Harmony became an ordinary town with a municipal government; it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and both Owen's and the Harmonists' experiments can still be seen in it.

The North American Phalanx, New Jersey

The Phalanx's main residence in Colts Neck Township, Monmouth County, shortly before it burned in November 1972. Photograph by the National Park Service's Historic American Buildings Survey.

The Albany Fourierist Association founded the Phalanx in 1843. Fourierists followed Charles Fourier (1772–1837), a French socialist whose ideas spread after his death; the Albany group was one of many such associations in the country. They held that communal living was inevitable — the social order God intended — yet religion played little or no part in how the Phalanx was actually run.

• The association bought land in Monmouth County, New Jersey. In 1843 half a dozen families moved there to ready it for the rest, who followed the next spring. It became the longest-lasting Fourierist association in the United States.
• Much of what is known comes from Charles Sears, a member who stayed a Fourierist after it ended and published a first-hand account in 1886.

A community run as a company. The Phalanx worked on the joint-stock principle: the community itself was a business, and every resident owned shares. That let it live communally inside the American economy — it still used U.S. money, and could hire outside help for farm work when needed.

• Work: orchards, subsistence farming and crops for sale, and later manufacturing jobs for women members.
• Pay weighed how useful a job was against how unpleasant: the more necessary and disagreeable, the better paid — cleaning animal stalls earned more than baking bread.
• Housing: each family had its own apartment in shared apartment blocks; everyone ate together.
• Organization: life was divided into series and groups. The agricultural series, for example, had farming, market gardening, orchard and experimental groups of three to seven members, each electing a "chief" to sit on the council that formed the Department of Agriculture.
• Voting: universal — anyone old enough to be a regular working member voted, and anyone of any gender could hold office.

The end. In 1856 a fire destroyed the mill and everything in it, leaving the Phalanx $30,000 in debt — roughly a million dollars in 2023 terms. The members voted to dissolve, sold everything, paid the debt and divided what was left. Some tried to build the Phalanx again elsewhere. Its main residence stood until November 1972: two months after it was added to the National Register, it burned and was bulldozed.

Arden, Delaware

Arden still exists. The sculptor Frank Stephens and the architect Will Price founded it in 1900 on Georgist economics. It has since grown to include Ardentown and Ardencroft; together, "the Ardens" form the Ardens Historic District, on the National Register. With about 250 households and 500 residents, Arden became an artists' colony.

Georgism. Henry George, a 19th-century reformer, worried about the inequality that came from land ownership and taxes on goods. His answer: people should keep the full value of what they make, while the value of land and its natural resources belongs equally to everyone — hence its other name, the single-tax movement.

• In Arden no one owns land. A Trust holds it all and leases it to residents for ninety-nine years at a time.
• Rents are set by a Board of Assessors of seven, elected every year by the residents.

Two more ideas shaped it:

Today Arden is a working single-tax community of about 500, run much as it was at its founding (though residents can change that), with a lively theater that has staged Shakespeare since the village began.

What they share

All three wanted to improve the society around them. New Harmony and the Phalanx set out to remake society quickly; Arden aimed smaller, and has produced lasting change of the kind its founders wanted. Utopian communities are one way — an extreme one that takes a great deal of planning — to pursue social change, and whatever their fate, their value lies in making people imagine other ways to organize society.

Sources

Based on "Secular Utopias in America," researched and written by Alyssa Eveland, American Conservation Experience Fellow, for the National Park Service's Cultural Resources Office of Interpretation and Education; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Its sources: the National Register nomination forms for the Village of Arden and the North American Phalanx and the National Historic Landmark form for New Harmony; the Village of Arden; C. Sears, The North American Phalanx: An Historical and Descriptive Sketch (1886); D. E. Pitzer and D. Jones, New Harmony Then & Now (2012). The source spells Owen as "Owens" in places and Fourierist as "Fouriest"; both are corrected here. Engraving by F. Bate (1838); photograph by the Historic American Buildings Survey. The source's photographs of Rappite houses (St. Joseph County Public Library) and of Arden's Craft Shop (a Wikimedia user) are not reproduced.