The Three Phases of Modern Times - Communitarian, Reform, and Long Island

MODERN TIMES, NEW YORK, a trial village of anarchism and a center for social reform, founded in 1851 by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews, was the only one of the ideal communities formed before the Civil War to be located on Long Island.Founded in 1851 by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews, it was located forty-one miles by rail from Brooklyn and four miles inland from the Great South Bay, a mere clearing in the wilderness of pitch pine and scrub oak that covered the interior of the Suffolk County town of Islip.This paper explores the problems encountered by Modern Times for thirteen years, as it tested a polity unencumbered by state, church, or organized wealth.It attempts to explain why enthusiasm for testing waned until, in 1864, the settlers decided to change the name of their village to its present one of Brentwood.It considers this enclave of eccentrics as a three-phased phenomenon, affecting the history of the communitarian movement from which it evolved, the reform movement in which it took part, and the Long Island culture with which eventually it blended.Each phase is a study in nonconformity.As an ideal village compared with its Shaker or Oneida counterparts, the family unit was nuclear rather than universal, the housing separate instead of collective, the holding of property private, not communal.As a generator of reform, Modern Times was harmed by its promiscuous image, due first to its indifference to whether its couples were legally married and then to the crusade for sexual liberation waged by a vanguard of free love activists.In its third and historically overlooked aspect as a factor in Long Island's development, Modern Times was an eastern frontier in the era of westward expansion,