The Economics of Utopia

One of the greatest challenges the American utopian communes faced was the question of how to actualize their radical convictions regarding ownership and property with the reality of the capitalist society in which they found themselves living. As most readers will likely be aware, the utopian societies shared a universal conviction that communism was the ultimate expression of a true Christian society. The problem that not even the most extreme proponents of communism could escape, however, was that each group quickly discovered that it was ultimately impossible to create a completely self-sufficient society. Some level of economic interaction with the broader capitalist world around them was always necessary.

In this essay, I will demonstrate how the three most prominent utopian communist groups attempted to navigate this challenge. We will observe the Oneida Perfectionists in upstate New York, the Amana Inspirationists in central Iowa, and the Shaker villages scattered throughout the US. For each community, we will first examine the nature of their economy and then examine how their economic development was shaped by external factors. We will find that while these communities started with strong communist ideals, each eventually encountered some form of hardship that forced them to rely on outside sources of labor. This introduction of waged labor within the community ultimately undermined and weakened conviction in the communist ideals these communities cherished so dearly. These developments would end up being a significant factor in the communities’ eventual abandonment of communism and their ultimate demise.

Oneida

The Oneida community boasted one of the most robust economies of the utopian movement. The community attracted several ambitious businessmen and entrepreneurs, which enabled them to create several successful industries in diverse fields. 

Oneida's most famous enterprise is undoubtedly its flatware production. Oneida Ltd. is the largest designer and manufacturer of silver-plated tableware and cutlery in North America, and its brand and subsidiaries are ubiquitous in sit-down restaurants and hotels across the country. However, it's worth noting that the manufacture of dinnerware did not support the Oneida commune, as Oneida Ltd. only began producing tableware in 1899, nearly 20 years after the commune dissolved. Its common economic assets were transferred into a joint-stock company. Therefore, silverware and any other products made by Oneida Ltd. fall outside the scope of this essay.

The Perfectionists established Oneida in 1848. In the early years, the community tried to sustain itself financially primarily through agricultural enterprises. However, as the community grew, this quickly proved unsustainable. By 1857, the community had burned through nearly half of the starting capital that had been raised by its members. Consequently, the community’s leadership was highly motivated to expand their operations beyond agriculture and into more profitable economic endeavors.

 In comparison to the other utopian societies, Oneida was considerably less agriculturally focused at all points of its history. The society’s founder, John Noyes, explicitly declared that in his view, the singleminded propensity towards farming was the cause of failure for the majority of communistic endeavors in the US.(1)(2) Another factor that contributed to this directional difference was the fact that Oneida attracted a lot more members of the middle class than the majority of other groups. This was due both to the intellectual background of its founders, and the fact that, unlike the majority of the other utopian societies, Oneida was unique in being one of the few ones not founded by European immigrants (usually of the lower working class). 

One of the first industries to see success at Oneida was their food canning factory. Canning was an innovation that had just appeared at the beginning of the 19th century. The Perfectionists, ever quick to capitalize on new economic innovations, quickly jumped onto the exploding new market. While the struggling economy in post-war America kept profit margins thin, the venture still looked compelling to the community for many years.(2)

From the very beginning, the Oneidans found that a factory business required more manpower than the community could provide. They therefore began hiring waged laborers to fill the factories. As their operations expanded over the years, so too did the number of employees the community hired. Eventually, community members largely only held management and supervision positions in the cannery. This model would become the standard for all their future economic endeavors.

Despite early success, Oneida’s food cannery ultimately proved incapable of remaining competitive in the rapidly evolving post-war economy. The manager of the food processing industry was sent to Yale to study biochemistry in 1866. Upon his return, he was able to bring significant innovations to the factory, such as the process of pasteurization. Ultimately, however, innovation proved insufficient. Throughout the United States, larger corporations found it progressively easier to corner markets on a national scale through rapidly developing industrialization and the proliferation of railroads. Smaller regional manufacturers such as the Oneida community simply found it impossible to remain competitive as these larger companies kept pushing prices lower. In 1868, the Perfectionists closed the cannery, as the overwhelming amount of work was simply no longer worth the minuscule profits. Several attempts would be made to resurrect the business over the following years, but ultimately none would prove successful.(3)

Another important and unconventional industry of the community was silk spinning. Beginning in 1866, Oneida began to import silk from China and process it into thread for sale outside the community. The business saw incredible early growth, in the first year they invested in six Singer sewing machines.(4) Within three years, a second factory was opened at one of Oneida’s satellite communities. The Oneidans’ approach in this venture demonstrates one of the strengths of business startups within communist communal societies. Income and expenditures for enterprises within such communities are usually managed through one single account. Therefore, any single enterprise can run at a loss while the community is still maintaining positive cash flow through its other industries. This means it’s significantly easier for businesses to make large investments during their startup phase in such communities. This advantage can, however, be a double-edged sword, as it proved to be for the Oneidans. They were not the only ones capitalizing on the silk boom; across America, there was an explosion of factories producing silk and other textiles to meet the post-war demand. In a similar fashion to their cannery venture, the communists found themselves priced out of the market by aggressive corporations with superior distribution networks. After only 7 years in production, the silk factory had to cut production during the market panic of 1873, and completely close down shortly thereafter. While they were eventually able to reopen, the factory would never achieve it’s pre-1873 production rates again.(5)

The Oneida community did maintain one enterprise that was considerably more successful than their aforementioned ventures. In 1823, a 17-year-old Oneida, NY local named Sewall Newhouse developed an innovative game trap with pieces of scrap metal in his father’s blacksmith shop. Over the next two decades, Newhouse turned this new design into a small side business, handcrafting dozens of traps every year and shipping them to game trappers all over the United States. In 1849, Newhouse met John Noyes and joined the Perfectionists, bringing his side hobby with him. Within a few years, Newhouse was producing so many traps annually that the community created a factory to automate the process. The investment was immensely successful, in 1870, 21 years after Newhouse brought the venture to Oneida, the community broke records by producing 337,000 traps.(6) By this point, Newhouse & Victor Trap Company had long become the backbone of Oneida’s financial health. 

Despite this success, the trap industry was not immune to the financial hardships of the early 1870s. Just two years after the record-setting production run of 1870, the community cut back the daily operations of the trap shop from 10 to 8 hours, so as not to outproduce demand in a rapidly shrinking market.(7) Another significant cost-cutting measure was the incorporation of child labor into the trap workshop. In his memoir, Pierrepont Noyes, the son of Oneida’s founder John Noyes, recounts his time helping the trap-makers by linking metal rings together to form anchor chains for traps. The children worked in the basement of the mansion house. Every day after lunch, they would file downstairs and take their place around a long worktable. Each child had a vise and a twisting tool. They would grab an unformed chain link, slip it through the existing piece of chain, clamp it in place with the vise, use the twisting tool to bend it around into a full link, then repeat the process. Each child was tasked with making a hundred chains a day. This usually took them about an hour. After they were finished, they were free to go about the day at their leisure.(8) Whether this change actually made a significant impact on the company’s bottom line is unclear.

By the mid-1870s, the community of 300 was hiring nearly 250 employees. There was now a serious dichotomy in the community’s life: while on the surface, the members of the community lived in an idyllic communist utopia, in reality, their society was supported on the back of an unquestionably capitalist industrial empire. The utopian communists, rather than presenting an alternative society to the world around them, unwittingly became just another facet of the capitalist employing class in the rapidly developing American economy. By 1876, Charles Nordhoff concluded that “Oneida is, in reality, more a large and prosperous manufacturing corporation…than a commune in the common sense of the word.”(9) This sense of incongruity began to weigh on the community heavily in its closing years. Beginning in the 1870s, Oneida was rocked by several significant scandals within the community’s leadership. In 1879, Noyes resigned from his position as leader and placed himself in voluntary exile. Amidst controversy, financial hardship, and a swelling sense of disillusionment within the membership, Oneida dissolved community of goods and became a joint-stock company in 1888.

Shaker

It is significantly harder to get as comprehensive an understanding of Shaker economics as we can get from Oneida. Of course, like every utopian society, communism was the foundation of the Shaker entire economy. The scattered nature of the various Shaker communes makes it difficult to gain an accurate primary source account regarding the nature of their industry. The Shakers had deacons appointed in each community whose specific role was the oversight and management of that commune’s financial concerns.(10) These deacons exercised complete control over the economic endeavors of their community. Furthermore, in their membership oaths, each individual Shaker had explicitly sworn not to ask about or assert authority on any financial or economic matters within the community, as these matters were merely a distraction from their true calling of living pious lives dedicated to the pursuit of deeper spirituality.(11) Consequently, the Shaker communes didn’t practice any of the financial transparency that we see from groups like Oneida, who annually published their financial statements to the whole community.(12) This lack of transparency makes it challenging to comprehend the Shakers' financial environment from a modern-day perspective, and we rely heavily on external sources to gain insight into the economic aspects of their daily life.

One of our best sources on the Shaker economy is Charles Nordhoff, a 19th-century journalist who visited 18 different Shaker communes in 1873, as he was working on his book Communistic Societies of the United States. Nordhoff’s careful notes give us a remarkably comprehensive overview of Shaker industry at that time. Nordhoff observed that agriculture was the foundation of the Shaker economy. Almost every single community considered farming, in all its various aspects, to be their primary occupation. Head Elder Frederick Evans, a historically prominent leader of the movement who Nordhoff personally met, stated that every attempt to create a Shaker commune based around manufacturing was a mistake.(13) Each community maintained somewhere between one and five thousand acres, although one Kentucky commune owned thirty thousand, which they engaged in ranching. Corn was their primary crop, and the majority kept cattle or sheep as well. In terms of industry, Shakers predominantly stuck to practical manufacturing. With very little exception, the only goods the communities manufactured were such that were in demand by the commune itself. The most common products are simple, such as brooms, chairs, barrels, shoes, flannel, and cloth. Broom-making in particular was ubiquitous, every community produced them for their own use and often for sale as well. Beyond brooms, each community generally produced a less consistent smattering of other practical items. Roughly half operated a sawmill, and some a blacksmith shop as well.(14)

The practicality of Shaker industry should not be understood as simplicity. One of the outstanding and lesser-known legacies of the utopian movement is the impressive inventor spirit these communities seemed to attract. The Shakers in particular were remarkably innovative. Throughout the 19th century, they accrued an impressive list of inventions that we still encounter in our everyday lives. Shakers were the first to create flat brooms, and they developed specialized machinery which significantly increased the speed of broom manufacture. Their community in Canterbury, NY invented and manufactured the first wheel-driven washing machine. Shaker gardeners were the first to sell seeds in pre-packaged paper packets. The kitchens in their large communal dining halls, which usually had to feed upwards of 250 people, were the site of several innovations for the food industry. They invented the screw-driven apple peeler, and rotary ovens, which are a mainstay in commercial bakeries today. Their carpenters revolutionized woodworking with the invention of the circular saw. These examples don’t yet comprise even half of the innovations the Shakers produced, but they do illustrate an important attribute of Shaker's work ethos; what they did, they did well. Just as in their spiritual lives, in their work, Shakers demonstrated a constant drive to improve and perfect. 

Unlike their Oneidan counterparts, from an early stage, the Shakers were concerned with reliance on external labor. Their leaders recognized the tension with their communist ideals and were particularly concerned with the effects of long-term exposure between their members and hired hands, who would in the vast majority of cases not be sympathetic or understanding of their religious convictions. Nevertheless, as time passed, the society became more and more reliant on waged laborers to make ends meet. The Civil War and its aftermath dealt a major blow to the popularity of utopian ideals in American society. The celibate Shakers were more reliant on recruitment as a source of growth than were the other utopian societies, and after the war, their population fell into a steady decline. More and more, their dwindling workforces had to be supplemented by hired labor, but as their membership aged, more and more of their villages were forced to shutter their doors for good. 

Amana

The Amana Inspirationists were settled in east-central Iowa, spread across seven villages, each about a mile apart. They immigrated to the US in 1842 and founded their Iowa colonies in 1856, roughly a decade after Oneida was founded. As they developed their own economic structure, Amana eventually struck a balance between the Shakers and the Oneida Commune. While their group structure resembled the Shakers’ multi-communal approach, the Inspirationists’ seven villages maintained a much tighter sense of single identity than did the Shaker communes, which were scattered across much greater geographical distances. 

While the broader Amana Church was overseen by a council of elders, economically, each individual Amana village functioned as an independent entity. Local boards of trustees managed the day-to-day operations in each village. The villages maintained the majority of practical necessities to function independently, such as carpenters, butchers, tailors, cobblers, blacksmiths, and watchmakers. However, each village still made significant contributions to the whole, three villages operated a dairy, a bakery, and a soap-maker, respectively, which each served the whole collective. Even the tamer vices were taken care of, the community maintained a tobacco farm and rolled their own cigars, as well as a brewery and winery which produced a steady supply of beer and wine.(15)(16) With this federated infrastructure, the Amana colonies were able to be extremely flexible in distributing manpower. Any enterprise that was shorthanded or entering a busy season could temporarily draw help from across the entire community. Thus, the Amana colonies represented a loose but largely self-sustaining economic ecosystem. Theirs was a system much more centralized than the scattered Shaker communes, while significantly more economically independent and self-sustaining than the Oneida Commune had ever managed to become. 

Amana’s agricultural endeavors were both sizable and varied. The villages were built on and surrounded by 26,000 acres. Hence, farming was the most demanding occupation in terms of raw manpower. Besides a significant portion of the villages’ 1500 members, roughly 200 field hands had to be hired to fill the necessary roles within the farming sector. Amana’s crop rotation was surprisingly varied, consisting of rye, barley, oats, corn, potatoes, and onions. In addition to farmland, the community dedicated a lot of acreage to pasture. They kept roughly two thousand heads each of cattle, sheep, and hogs, as well as a small herd of horses. Despite the size of this operation, agriculture was never a for-profit endeavor for Amana. The community farmed only for internal consumption, what little they did sell was the excess from their own use, and over the long run, income from the farm usually couldn’t pay its own expenses. 

Textile was Amana’s primary industry. The Inspirationists operated wool mills in two of their seven villages. In 1896, roughly 125 Amana residents and 20 hired hands were employed in the mills. Collectively, they produced about 500,000 yards of fabric each year. In stark contrast to the Oneida silk-works, the Amana mills were reportedly never able to output enough product to sufficiently meet the market demand. Amana attributed this to the fact that they had a fundamentally different vision for their community’s industry than the Oneida commune did. 

Besides the textile factories, the community operated two feed mills, two sawmills, and seven general stores, one in each village. These industries were, however, only partially externally oriented. The feed mills processed the community’s grain, which, as previously mentioned, was largely raised for their own use. They did however also process the harvests of their neighboring farmers for a fee, which, along with the sale of their own annual excess, did produce a modest profit. The sawmills were similarly largely employed to cut lumber and firewood for the community but saw frequent business from the local community as well.(17)

The general stores are interesting because they were used equally by the community and the local populace. Distribution of amenities is always a challenging problem for communist societies. Finding the right balance between what’s necessary and what’s merely convenient is difficult enough. But the decision of what to provide for members is further complicated by various variables like personal preference, special needs, price differences, and a myriad of other factors. With a population of 1500 people, the Amana colonies dealt with this conundrum on a bigger scale than any of the other utopian groups.(18) Their solution was the general store, each family maintained an account with an annual budget based on the number of individuals within the household. Members could supplement this with any small income provided by their personal hobbies. With this system, individuals could still keep some autonomy and personal preference with their personal amenities, while the budget ensured that no one was too excessive in their expenditures.(19)

Besides these larger industries, Amana maintained a variety of smaller, essential trades in each village. While I have already covered a bunch of these at the beginning of this section, it is by no means a comprehensive list. Some of these could be surprisingly specific, such as a white-washer, who traveled between the villages repainting the interiors of their houses, a full rotation of all 7 villages taking roughly a whole year.(20)

In terms of industry, the Inspirationists actively sought to strike a balance between the agriculture-focused Shakers and the industrious Oneidans, and on this front, it appears they largely succeeded. While the Inspirationists agreed with Oneida that successful manufacturing enterprises were the key to financial sustainability for the commune, they did not agree with the lengths Oneida would go to get there. Amana’s primary disagreement was concerning hired help. The Shakers had long touted the dangers of over-reliance on waged employees. For counter-cultural communities dedicated first and foremost to righteousness and piety, opening the door to a constant and pervasive outside influence could not be seen as anything but dangerous. 

Returning to the issue of Amana’s textile factories, to expand their wool mills, Amana would be required to dramatically increase the number of outsiders they hired. In stark contrast to Oneida, whose factories were almost entirely run by hired workers, this was something that Amana actively tried to avoid. Their experience with extensive hiring in their fieldwork had taught them the pitfalls of trying to incorporate outsiders into their close-knit religious community. The clash of values and ‘worldly influence’ that it introduced—especially on their young people—was deemed not worth the tradeoff. 

The focus on providing members with meaningful occupations rather than maximizing profits was one of the defining features of Amana’s work culture. While the community still placed a high value on diligence and a good work ethic, the financial pressures that are a defining part of work for most of the world were largely not a factor within their communistic society. While these factors were of course similarly present in Oneida and the Shaker villages, the one-sided nature of their economies caused those groups to find themselves in tight financial positions much earlier than Amana. By the turn of the century, Oneida had abandoned communism and disappeared as a religious community for over a decade, and the Shaker villages were all in serious decline. Amana, meanwhile, would only start seeing serious financial pressures two decades later, when both a flour mill and a textile factory were destroyed by fire. The onset of the Great Depression finally brought the community’s economy to its knees, and coupled with major religious unrest, the community abandoned communism in 1932. 

Conclusion

As these three accounts demonstrate, the American utopian societies each ultimately had to contend with the fact that as strong as their convictions for spiritual communism may have been, they still ultimately had to come to terms with the broader capitalist society around them. Each society found itself dependent on the outside economy for survival, and as the decades passed, the lingering question of how to reconcile this reality became increasingly complicated by the seemingly unstoppable reliance on hired labor. Ultimately, it proved to be their undoing, in the words of Amana’s late leader Henry Moerschel: “Communism, wasn’t practical”(21)

(1) Noyes, 1966, p.19 as quoted by Cooper, Matthew. “Relations of Modes of Production in Nineteenth Century America: The Shakers and Oneida.” Ethnology, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Jan., 1987), pp. 8

(2) Coffee, K. ‘The Oneida Community and the utility of liberal capitalism’. Radical Americas, 2019, 4( 1): 3, pp. 1–21. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2019.v3.1.003.

(3) Ibid

(4) Selling for about $75 to $100 at the time, six of these machines represented an investment of roughly $16,000 today.

(5) Ibid.

(6) ‘Financial Statement for 1869’, Circular, 10 January 1870, 339–40. https://archive.org/details/sim_oneida-circular_1870-01-10_6_43/page/n2/mode/1up

(7) Oneida Circular 1873-10-27: Vol 10 Iss 44, 349. https://archive.org/details/sim_oneida-circular_1873-10-27_10_44/page/349/mode/1up

(8) Noyes, Pierrepont. My Father’s House. (New York, Holt Rinehart, and Winston. 1965). 103

(9) Nordhoff, Charles. The Communistic Societies of the United States. (New York, Hillary House Publishers, 1962). 393

(10) ibid. 148

(11) ibid. 148-149

(12) Charles Nordhoff mentions one notable exception to this rule. The Shaker commune at Union Hill, NY held weekly meetings to discuss their work lives and financial state. According to the local leaders, this was done to give their younger members a stronger sense of ownership and investment in the community, as they were struggling to keep their youth once they came of age.

(13) Shambaugh, Bertha. Amana: The Community of True Inspiration. (USA: Penfield Press, 1988). 175

(14) Nordhoff. 179-215

(15) The brewery was shut down in 1884 in accordance with the state-wide prohibition which led to the Iowa City Beer Riots. Nearly a hundred years later, in 1985, Amana would reopen it under the name Millstream Brewery. It was the first Iowa brewery to open after the passing of the 21st Amendment.

(16) Shambaugh. 168-188

(17) Nordhoff. 31-32

(18) The next closest commune in terms of population was the Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill, whcih numbered approximately 600 members. Oneida peaked at about 280 members.

(19) Yambura, Barbara. A Change and a Parting. (United States: Penfield Press, 2001), 167-175

(20) Ibid. 89-93

(21) MANNERS & MORALS: Communists Turned Capitalists,” Time, September 7, 1959 https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,825885,00.html