When John Humphrey Noyes slipped across the Canadian border in June 1879, he was fleeing potential criminal charges arising from his leadership of the Oneida Community, a utopian religious commune in central New York State. For three decades, Noyes had directed his followers to reject “sticky love” for a single partner and embrace “Complex Marriage,” which enfolded all members of the community in multiple sexual relations. The eugenics program he initiated in 1869, which sought to promote virtuous traits, actually specified who could have sex with whom. Of the 58 children who resulted from this system, Ellen Wayland-Smith notes in her lively history of Oneida, “Noyes fathered ten . . . while another nineteen were his blood relatives.” Several births were the product of uncle-niece unions, and Noyes at least contemplated father-daughter and brother-sister relations.
This is not the biography you expect for the founding father of a silverware manufacturer that by 1946 was touting its products as indispensable accessories to the upwardly mobile lifestyle of postwar nuclear families. Noyes’s insistence that Complex Marriage was “a religious sacrament of the highest order” was such an embarrassment to his respectable middle-class descendants that in 1947 they burned the Oneida Community’s archives, hoping to incinerate all record of the evolution of this radical 19th-century group into the profitable company they renamed Oneida Limited.
Though the name change was for business reasons that Wayland-Smith explains with her customary cogency, it seems obviously symbolic of the larger cultural shift her book chronicles: from aspiring to create God’s perfect community on Earth to the more limited goal of co-existing with the secular world while striving to maintain some of the old ideals. One of the reasons Oneida officially abandoned Complex Marriage a few months after Noyes’s departure was to protect the community’s women and children — “adulteresses and bastards, all, by the outside world’s cold estimation,” Wayland-Smith points out. The “stirpicults” (products of the 10-year eugenics experiment) desperately needed legal status after court decisions criminalizing polygamy. Some of the new, conventionally married couples continued to live collectively in the Mansion House in family apartments cobbled together from the former maze of single rooms; others built private houses around it on land still owned by the community, creating a new village they called Kenwood.
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Noyes’s son Pierrepont, who at the turn of the 20th century used mass advertising to grow Oneida’s small silverware business into an economic powerhouse, insisted that the original group’s communal principles could be applied in the workplace. Oneida’s factory workers were well paid, received cost-of-living increases and a share of the company’s profits in good years, and in bad years knew that management would take pay cuts alongside employees. Pierrepont was far more conventional than his father (who died in Canadian exile in 1886), but they shared a vision of Oneida as a shining example to the cruel capitalist world. The difference was that Pierrepont no longer expected what his father had unabashedly called “Bible Communism” to transform that world through sex and selflessness.
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The stirpicults and their children continued to intermarry, and the company was run by a Noyes until 1981. Wayland-Smith, whose great-great-great-grandparents were among John Humphrey’s earliest converts, spent Christmases and summers at Kenwood during her childhood in the 1970s and ’80s. Her affection for the remnants of communal life still evident in those days tempers her sharp assessment of the way the Oneida company’s shrewd marketing of silverware as a vehicle for society’s fantasies about marriage and the home went hand-in-hand with the Oneida community’s return to traditional gender roles, jettisoning the founders’ commitment to collective child-rearing and labor. Even more than the shoddy business practices that led to Oneida Limited’s bankruptcy in 2006, Wayland-Smith regrets this “kowtowing to conformity [and] loss of the energy and imagination behind the original dream.”
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She devotes the bulk of her text to the eccentric visionaries who tried to live the dream from 1848 to 1879. Wayland-Smith’s detailed account of those three fraught decades scants neither the weirdness of John Humphrey Noyes’s religious and sexual teachings nor his authoritarianism, and she fully explores the pain some followers endured in submitting to his dictates. But she emphasizes the satisfactions of collectively creating a new way of life, of finding ways to work and love beyond the confines of convention. Her nuanced and empathetic book vividly captures the spirit of a brief historical moment when “free love and industrial prosperity, communism and capitalism, women’s lib and millennial Christianity appeared to share a sunny future together.”
ONEIDA: From Free-Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table — an American Story
By Ellen Wayland-Smith
Picador, 320 pp., $27
Wendy Smith is a contributing editor at The American Scholar and reviews books frequently for The Washington Post.