Commune People

The problem with being the change that you want to see in the world is that the world will get its own back on you eventually. This strange little book, published in West Germany in the early 1970s and now wrested out of the dustbin of history and translated into English, is a sympathetic pocket guide to the various ways in which a prefigurative utopian socialism has been built in the United States of America since before its foundation. The Marxian objection to these experiments—that utopian enclaves do not affect the workings of the capitalist system at large and that capitalism will eventually force them to conform to its demands—is pretty spectacularly borne out by the fact that in the mid-nineteenth century around 100,000 Americans lived in communes (a significant number in a far less populous country of 23 million people—it would be over a million Americans today in relative terms), yet the US has notoriously never produced a mass socialist or labor party. But that doesn’t make the details of these experiments any less fascinating.

The authors, a German academic/architect couple, are themselves a puzzle. The editors and translators, Jack Self and Winston Hampel, point out that Liselotte, whose background was in business and sociology, was the likely main writer of the book, but Oswald Mathias was the better known of the two and is usually credited for the firm’s work in the 1970s and 1980s. Ungers specialized in an austere, cubic architecture that could be called either stripped classical or a classicized modernism. Their work shared an aesthetic with the likes of Aldo Rossi and Giorgio Grassi, melancholic Communists looking longingly at the Renaissance and the architecture of Italian Fascism. Yet in the hands of the Ungerses’ students such as Hans Kollhoff, this style has gradually become the state style of reunified Germany. It suggests conservatism, rationality, a certain smug end-of-history conformism. So picking up Communes in the New World, you might expect a Manfredo Tafuri–style attack on these American communards for their naïve belief that they could escape the ruthless logic of capital. You would be mistaken—this is a dry, taxonomic but ultimately celebratory book. These rationalists have come to praise the utopians, not bury them.

Communes in the New World derives from the pair’s time in the aftermath of 1968, teaching and traveling around the US. Too old for student radicalism, they were nonetheless cautiously sympathetic to it, and their judgments about the American communes are subtly informed by the gender and race politics that were thrown to the fore at the end of the ’60s. A strong taxonomic impulse is perhaps the only obvious link to the Ungerses’ architectural practice. Early in the book, they provide a chart with tick boxes for the various ways of organizing an American commune—by ideological basis (socialist, religious, or both), numbers (ranging from 500 for the Icarians to tens of thousands of Moravians), stance on property (shared by most, held cooperatively by the Fourierites, or financed by the commune founders in New Harmony, Indiana), and sex lives (celibacy for the Shakers and Rappites, nuclear families for the Amana or the Hutterites, and “complex marriage” for the particularly delightful Perfectionists). This is paralleled in the map that accompanies the text, in which the US is pockmarked with initials denoting the locations of the communes that populated this utopian archipelago, whether they were the Fourierites of the Wisconsin Phalanx; the Oneida, New York, Perfectionists; the Icarians of Nauvoo, Illinois; the Separatists of Zoar, Ohio; or the Shakers of Enfield, Connecticut.

So what of the communes themselves? They have their roots in one or both of the following: the first strain is the radical reformation of the seventeenth century, when (as luridly documented in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium) the likes of the Swiss German Anabaptists seceded not just from the mother church but from mainstream Protestantism as well, creating their own communities outside of Babylon. This is already a familiar trope in American history and can be seen as a more apocalyptic and communal version of the Protestant settler utopianism that founded the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The other stream is less stereotypically American—the early utopian socialist microsocieties usually associated with the names of their founders: the joyously eccentric speculations of Charles Fourier in France or the more structured industrial machine civilization instituted by the Welsh factory owner Robert Owen at New Lanark, a secluded milltown in central Scotland.

Here, you find out some of what happened next, as these experimenters had the immense and, thanks to genocide, sparsely populated expanse of the US to play with. Some of these stories are of awful failure. Owen’s ambitious New Harmony, for instance, an attempt at deploying New Lanark’s ideas at scale, was abortive—he reluctantly returned to the UK for a fascinating second act as a revolutionary socialist agitator and early feminist. American Fourierites had a slightly better time, but their sexual libertarianism and skepticism toward organized religion sometimes got them into trouble. But some of the most interesting groups, like the Perfectionists, were in many ways wholly American creations, bold, confident efforts in libertarian communism in defiance of an increasingly conservative and increasingly capitalist country.

Those communes in France and Britain are often considered to be part of the prehistory of modern architecture. New Lanark, with its harshly beautiful setting in a gorge, is as hardline as any functionalist housing estate, consisting of simple tenements and factories with no change in style when Owen created a utopian Institute for the Formation of Character at the center of it. Similarly, the Familistère, the somewhat watered-down version of Fourier’s ideas devised by the industrialist Jean-Baptiste Gorin for the workers of his factory in Guise, has been seen as an anticipation of Constructivism both in its “social condenser” plan and the iron-and-glass structure. Yet, curiously, there is rather little architecture in the book, and what there is, is not particularly protomodernist. The Ungerses are intrigued when they find Moravians or Hutterites approximating the half-timbered vernacular of their German and Czech homelands, and there are some informative plans of the more ambitious communal houses such as Oneida’s Mansion House, whose layout integrating living quarters and collective facilities is more noteworthy than its cute but unimaginative Victorian eclectic towers and gables. By and large, though, the authors are more interested in the social than the formal.

Some of the potted histories of these enclaves are bleak, and as you’d expect there are a few sinister cult leaders and mini-dystopias to be found here. The unusually long-lived German Amana society of “True Inspirationists” in Iowa gradually collapsed in the twentieth century, as first its communal property was converted into a joint-stock company and then its self-perpetuating ruling class of “Elders” refused to allow more than a handpicked minority to engage in anything other than manual work. Others have thrived into the 1970s (and the present), whether through high birth rates, as in the case of the Hutterites, or through settling down from a failed socialist experiment into a pleasant liberal enclave, in the case of New Harmony.

But the Ungerses are also keen to find contemporary resonance for their own time. They note how a few of these microsocieties took a principled stance against the white supremacy that affected most of these experiments to one degree or another; the Shakers in particular were unusual as “the only community of their time whose community included minorities such as Jews and Black people.” The authors begin the book with a letter from Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, describing communes that were not “the contemporary scene in Berlin, Paris and San Francisco” but the rural US in the 1840s. The Ungerses end with some slightly perfunctory accounts of the new communes that emerged out of 1960s radicalism, such as Drop City in southern Colorado, whose ad hoc domes are even further from the rationalist grids of the Ungerses’ architecture than the half-timbered houses of the Moravians. They conclude with an amusingly stolid endorsement of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out. Ultimately, the authors see these communes all as successes of some kind—they proved American socialism was possible, at least in microcosm, and that is an achievement in itself. This is refreshing, but it’s hard to be entirely convinced by their enthusiasm, especially in a hyperexploitative world devised in large part by early ’70s Californian dropouts.

It is perhaps better to end with the epitaph the American Fourierist Warren Chase wrote for the Wisconsin Phalanx, which dissolved under the two major pressures on the American communes—from without, those who considered its social arrangements, and its emancipation of women, to be “immoral” and “licentious,” and from within, when its communards realized they could sell their own individual shares in their actually rather successful collective investment at a profit. The commune, Chase wrote, “was prematurely born, and tried to live before its proper time, and of course, must die and be born again.”