American Community: Radical Experiments in Intentional Living

In American Community: Radical Experiments in Intentional Living, Mark S. Ferrara shares a forgotten and scintillating thread of radical settler history, and contributes to both American history and utopian studies. Beyond the stories about pilgrims and puritans, beside the terror of genocide and slavery, early America also was a place of at times visionary social experimentation. From the 1620s to the 1980s, from the Ephratans and Zoarites, to the Lomalites and Olompalians, some settler groups worked toward another America. From the “tens of thousands of current and former intentional communities” in US history, Ferrara tells the stories of forty that “uniquely prioritized communal living and the sharing of resources . . . and therefore might be regarded as expressions of communal socialism in America” (2).The Zoarites, for instance, came by boat from Germany in 1816. On admission to the community in Zoar, Ohio, new members gave up all personal belongings forever. As one Zoar wryly observed, as a result not many rich people applied to join, “and we are glad of it. We would rather take poor people, half naked . . . provided they have the right character” (26). On such ideals, the Zoar community built twenty-seven multifamily houses, a net worth of over two million dollars, and grew for eight decades. They thrived thanks to aid and support from two local groups, the Indigenous Tuscarawas and the Quakers. They lived well with little energy use and a rich quality of life. A question that drove me as I read the book was: How might such stories nourish work today for social change and collective futures in this century?I preface this review with twin paradoxes that contextualize this research. First, telling Indigenous, Black, maroon, and other early histories in the United States is fundamental for working through the legacies and reverberations of colonialism toward possibilities for American futures. One obvious critique of this book on radical settler communities is that it may unwittingly perpetuate a colonial mindset by evacuating Indigenous peoples, African slaves, and other groups. Reading this made me want to read a book that would provide forty examples of early Indigenous, Black, maroon, and other groups’ stories. It is important to note that telling BIPOC histories in America is a precondition for collective conversations about reconciliation with the wounds of history, which is a precondition for having collective conversations about, never mind actualizing, Ferrara’s own main goal of a more equitable, communal, thriving American society. We need histories that combine the insights of settler histories, with parallel histories, work such as Nick Estes’s Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (2019), scholarship on the resilience of African Americans throughout US history,1 and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).Second, we also need fuller accounts of diverse settler histories, beyond the often highly simplistic versions. After all, the colonial world system and worldview has played the biggest role in creating today’s polycrisis of ongoing social harms and now ecological breakdown.2 A central task today is studying alternatives to that mainstream—past, present, and future. Directly to the point of building alternatives, Ferrara’s book focuses on sharing, equitable, local communities. The coevolution of the modern Western worldview and European colonialism took hold and grew particularly by subverting local autonomy. First within Europe,3 with enclosures that swept masses of rural people from commons lands, and then exported in global colonialism. It was the European elites’ modern world system that drove many of the groups Ferrara documents to flee to America in the first place.For this Ferrara’s book is relevant. His forty groups successfully pushed back against both capitalism and excess energy use. They created deeply rooted and ecological lifestyles and strong communities, with low energy use, resource sharing, and strong mutual aid. They created strong local food production and local markets, and often built good homes, culture, and quality of life.Ferrara organized the book chronologically and covered four large historical phases: the early colonists, the nineteenth-century social experiments by Perfectionists, Transcendentalists, Fourierists, Harmonists, and others, the New Deal era, and the communes of the 1960s and beyond, focusing more on the lesser-known stories from the 1600s through the 1800s. To complete the research, Ferrara traveled over 11,000 miles conducting site visits and interviews. Some places have archives, and some places are very active today, and at places like The Farm in Tennessee and Ithaca EcoVillage, he spoke with members, observed day-to-day life, and engaged in social activities. Ferrara’s stories are detailed enough to typologize both weaknesses and strengths, showing what most undermined these groups and what most empowered them. His personable and often quirky leaders created examples we can learn from and even build on today. Importantly, Ferrera chose an arc of history stretching from pre–fossil fuel social and economic forms of organization to the late twentieth century, providing insights for energy transition today. Finally, the last section shows increasingly diverse examples, for example how Indigenous, Black, LGBTQ+, and other groups made more recent, tangible change. Throughout a series of surprising and humorous stories, Ferrera argues that we can learn as much from these groups’ flaws and debacles as we can from their tales of economic, cultural, and ecological successes.The case studies reveal both differences and patterns, and can produce a lot of detailed data, typologies, insights, and anecdotes, useful for dreaming up social transformation today. Many of them are page turners. The controversial Swedish reformer Pastor Eric Janson, “a strikingly ugly individual . . . with . . . a scarred forehead, hypnotic blue eyes, and twitching facial muscles” (58), got through jail, went into hiding, and went on to bring 1,500 Jansonites to America on multiple transatlantic crossings, including two shipwrecks and one ship lost altogether. On arrival in Illinois, too late to plant food, hundreds of colonists sheltered in caves and earthen dugouts, one third of the community starved, and later more were lost in a cholera outbreak. A few years later, Janson was standing trial in a courtroom when in a revenge attack he was shot through the heart. The community, however, went on to build an impressively strong village and thrived for another twenty years (58–61).Other less volatile stories are just as intriguing. In the 1830s Thomas Lake Harris studied spiritual Universalism and went on to create a series of communal experiments from New York to California in order to create a new society—a “matrix of world redemption,” wherein human and celestial beings could unite (73). In the 1850s he adopted spiritualism, and founded a community at Mountain Cove, West Virginia, attracting one hundred seekers. He formulated a theory of “theo-socialism,” blending Fourierist egalitarianism, mystical Christianity, Swedenborgian spiritual unity, and Harris’s own cosmology. He wrote poetry, developed a technique of “Divine Respiration” (74), and he taught that Jesus was a “super Socialist” and God was both male and female (75–76). Mountain Cove collapsed in under three years. Harris, undeterred, went on to start several more long-lasting communities, attracting followers and finances. His settlement on Lake Erie attracted twenty Japanese converts, several prominent American women, and gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (75). Harris later founded Fountain Grove community in California, and built a small empire of Cabernet, Pinot Noir, and Zinfandel wines, sold throughout England, Japan, and the United States and deftly marketed as “‘divine liquor’ infused with celestial energy” (76).Ferrara also tells a story of a community built by and for white women (82–87). Martha McWhirter bore twelve children, but when her husband returned from the Civil War, she moved her bedroom down the hallway. Meanwhile, after one of her sisters was brutalized by a drunken spouse, Martha invited her to move in. Martha declared that women shouldn’t live with abusive husbands. She created a battered women’s shelter and later a women’s commune, first known as the Santificationists and later as the Belton Woman’s Commonwealth, whose combined histories spanned over a century from 1875 to 1984. In an inversion of women’s unpaid labor, they financialized domestic work outside the home: hauling wood, selling dairy products, working as maids, and building a laundry business. Members put their wages into a shared treasury, building financial independence. The group bought a ten-bedroom house in Washington, DC, and a 120-acre farm in Montgomery County, Maryland, properties that served as hostels or women’s shelters and rental units; the DC home provided a platform to advance progressive causes in the nation’s capital.One of Ferrara’s strengths lies in realistically nuanced portrayals, beyond the binary thinking entrenched in American thought. This book shows that early settler groups, often with the help of others such as Indigenous groups, created viable alternatives. Unearthing forty examples of radical settler experiments from 1620s to 1980s America, Ferrara shows long-term resistance to the ruling class, and to dominant colonial and capitalist ideas, as well as sacrifice and ingenuity in creating alternatives. His stories, uplifting and interesting, contribute to transcending negativity bias and defeatist thinking, and offer detailed narratives showing the weaknesses and strengths of working to create another America.The book also contributes to seeing the capacity for resistance among dominant or mainstream groups and to seeing examples of settler groups working for transformation. And it can contribute to a greater invitation needed for more collective dialogue to ensure that we work toward, not islands for the few, but societal change for all. Consider Mike Davis’s comment that Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia was the scariest book he ever read.4 By which maybe he meant that would-be visionaries have often created racist, gated ecotopias, which can contribute to further worsening both suffering of the majority and social crises for all. Working to shift the focus more toward both collective histories and collective futures is one of the significant shifts that utopian scholarship could provide.