Assassination Vacation (16 page)

The Oneida Community was an upstate tourist attraction right from the start, second, Valesky says, to Niagara Falls. I’m taking the same guided tour offered a hundred and fifty years ago to prim rubbernecks who came here to peep at sex fiends. I wonder how many of my vacationing forebears went home disappointed? They thought they were taking the train to Gomorrah but instead they got to watch herbs dry. Valesky opens a drawer in the herb cabinet so I can get a whiff. He mentions that back in the day, when one tourist was shown the cabinet she rudely asked her community-member guide, “What’s that odor?” To which the guide replied, “Perhaps it’s the odor of crushed selfishness.” Valesky grins. “How about that for a utopian answer?” To my not particularly utopian nose, crushed selfishness smells a lot like cilantro.

Then Valesky spells out an idea about this region — nicknamed the “Burned-over District” — that he had read in a book. I’m pretty sure I’ve read the same book. But one of the advantages of visiting historic sites as opposed to merely reading about them is the endearing glow of hometown pride. Valesky is a volunteer. Who knows how many times he’s said the thing he’s about to say? Yet he’s clearly in awe of the people who lived here and what they tried to accomplish. He doesn’t shy away from their faults — we do spend a few awkward minutes discussing the creepy, sleeping-with-your-teenage-niece aspects of Oneida life. But Valesky’s cheerleading for the community is touching. It’s also educational. There’s a lot to be learned from empathy.

The Burned-over District: In the first half of the nineteenth century, upstate New York erupted with eccentric, quasi-Christian joiners like the Mormons and the Shakers. “These people,” Valesky says, “were looking for something between the urban situation, with all its problems, and the frontier, which was beyond the pale in terms of any hope for success. So that’s what makes this whole area — the New England area and especially the upstate area — a prime target for the growth of utopian cultures. It was settled, it was civilized, it had local governments. But there was enough open land, there was enough opportunity, so that a new idea could be established and, in the case of Oneida, could flourish.”

The distribution of people and dogma, Valesky asserts, was helped by the Erie Canal, followed by the railroad. “I can’t help thinking,” he admits, “that the railroad, and particularly the spread of the railroad, is something that we can relate to in terms of computers, the World Wide Web. I think it was that fast and that cheap to run a single railroad spur from the main line out to a little community here, out to a little factory there, and that following the canal is what made this area so interesting and which allowed ideas as well as people carrying ideas to spread so quickly that you get terms like ‘Burned-over District.’ ”

I bet Valesky was a good high school history teacher. He might have made a decent movie director too. Every time he looks out the window, he sees farther than I, as if he’s about to bark instructions to a cinematographer on a crane, filming a time-lapse epic in which antlike canal diggers dissolve into workmen laying railroad tracks spliced into shots of lit matches and smoking fields giving way to praying Shakers, until Joseph Smith loads up the wagons for the Mormons’ first move west and the Oneida Community finally decides to make teapots instead of love.

Paintings of John Humphrey Noyes and his wife Harriet hang at the top of the stairs. Yes, Noyes was married. He was an abolitionist known to compare wifery up north to slavery down south, yet Noyes married Harriet in 1838. He sent her a proposal letter that made up in candor what it lacked in woo. Referring to Harriet not as his sweetheart but as his “yoke-fellow,” as if they were to be oxen strapped together hauling hay, Noyes informed her that his intentions toward said yoke-fellow “will be not to monopolize and enslave her heart or my own, but to enlarge and establish both, in the free fellowship of God’s universal family.” In other words, Harriet, don’t wait up.

Noyes married Harriet in their native Vermont, a full decade before leading his flock to Oneida. While his proposal isn’t one of history’s great love letters — I’ve received more sentimental invoices from my attorney — Noyes’s sympathy for Harriet’s childbearing heartbreaks early on in their marriage had a profound influence on the future sexual practices at Oneida, specifically what he came to call “male continence,” a sexual technique that’s about as fun as it sounds.

Harriet gave birth five times in six years but only one of those children lived. “This experience was what directed my studies and kept me studying,” Noyes later recalled. “After our last disappointment I pledged my word to my wife that I would never again expose her to such fruitless suffering.” At first, Noyes recounts, he simply vowed not to touch her. Then it occurred to him that genitalia have two functions — the reproductive (which led to the aforementioned catastrophes) and the social. He concluded that one function has little to do with the other and that he could eliminate the possibility of eggs being fertilized by not ejaculating. “I experimented on this idea,” he wrote, “and found that the self-control which it requires is not difficult; that my enjoyment was increased; that my wife’s experience was very satisfactory, as it had never been before; that we had escaped the horrors and the fear of involuntary propagation.”

Noyes broke down the sex act into three parts — the beginning, marked by “the simple
presence
of the male organ in the female,” the middle, involving “a series of reciprocal
motions,
” and of course the end, an “ejaculatory
crisis
which expels the seed.” Naturally, one’s thoughts turn to canoeing. Noyes described sex as a day trip to the nearby Niagara River. “The skilled boatman,” he asserts, will learn “the wisdom of confining his excursions to the region of easy rowing.” If not, it’s over the falls, and
splat.

At the Oneida Community, not ejaculating wasn’t just a hobby. It was a whole way of life. In fact, Noyes points out, “The Oneida Community in an important sense owed its existence to the discovery of Male Continence.” At its core, the community was about sharing — sharing love, sex, food, chores, money, decisions, time. The only thing the Oneida men were supposed to keep to themselves was their sperm. When I ask Valesky why masturbation was also frowned upon, he replies, “Self-pleasuring takes you away from the group.”

One of the corollaries of Noyes’s theory of group marriage was a taboo against “special love” and a system of defenses to guard against all kinds of intense passion. Consider the following set of problems and the ingenious way in which they were solved. Young people were always getting crushes. Young people only want to sleep with one another. Older people would like to enjoy sex but they aren’t as attractive as younger people. Oneida men are supposed to practice male continence, but perfecting male continence takes practice, and until teenage boys learn how to control themselves, their female partners are in danger of impregnation. So here’s what they did. Post-menopausal women deflowered young boys. That way, conception is avoided and older women enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Young girls, annoyingly prone to falling in love, were ushered into womanhood by an older male, usually by an experienced boater like Noyes himself. And, if his proposal to Harriet is any indication, Noyes had a knack for deflecting mushy sentiment by making a girl feel like part of a team.

The admonition against special love meant not only a ban on falling in love. It applied to all expressions of over-the-top passion. For example, a little girl who had grown too fond of her favorite doll was marched into the kitchen and told to toss it into the fire. A gifted violin player in danger of becoming a virtuoso and thus too attached to his instrument handed it over to the Oneida authorities and never played again. When a visiting Canadian teacher complained that the community did not foster “genius or special talent,” Noyes was delighted, replying, “We never expected or desired to produce a Byron, a Napoleon, or a Michelangelo.” You know you’ve reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.

Where did the other violinists — the ones who were kind of good but not
too
good — perform? Valesky ushers me into the grand room he says came to be known as the family hall, “a re-created nineteenth-century opera house. This,” he says, “is the only room that could hold the entire population and more, because almost three hundred people were living here. But beyond that, this was a very public room, so the public was invited to come to various performances given by community members. They had an orchestra, they had a choir, they did little operas, operettas, band concerts, chamber music.”

Every night, Valesky says, the group assembled here for a family meeting in which Noyes led them in discussions of spiritual and business issues. Valesky points at a pleasant old photograph of the room, in which people are sitting in rocking chairs or knitting or both. But before enjoying the evening’s aggressively second-rate entertainment, they would engage in what they thought of as a cleansing ritual, the enchantingly named Mutual Criticism.

Mutual Criticism required a member of the group to stand up in front of everybody and listen to the enumeration of his or her faults. The bright side of being that night’s subject for criticism was the rare treat at Oneida of being the center of attention. The downside was that everyone you knew and loved was allowed, even encouraged, to look into your eyes and ask, “You know what your problem is?”

Reading the accounts of community members’ moments in the critical sun, one thing that stands out is how specific the criticisms were. A young man was told that he didn’t read enough and that when he did he only “skims things.” A guy’s guy was picked on for his masculinity because “there is not woman enough about him.” Though my personal favorite is the New Englander who was taken to task for his “too frequent mention of Vermont.”

Despite its harshness, Mutual Criticism cleared the air, disinfecting the tension that necessarily breeds when human beings live in such close proximity. Perhaps everyone’s family unit or roommates should engage in the practice from time to time. I am imagining how my sister might have relished a ritualistic opportunity to discuss my flaws and how they affected her, such as my childhood tic of involuntarily humming aloud that went on throughout the Carter administration which in itself is bad enough until one recalls that my humming coincided with the heyday of “You Light Up My Life.”

While a nuclear family is capable of low-key but toxic resentment, a commune is Three Mile Island waiting to happen. In
Sleeping Where I Fall,
his memoir of living on an anarchist collective farm in California in the 1960s, Peter Coyote admits to the way his annoyance with his fellow communards sometimes trumped his laissez-faire ideals, leading him to tape up a list of house rules including, “It’s fine if you want to take speed, just don’t talk to
me
!”

Regarding Mutual Criticism, Valesky proclaims, “It would relate to personality issues, the whole idea being maintaining group stability, group harmony. Resolving conflicts would all be done by the group such that at the end, there would be a feeling that something has been discussed that needed to be.”

Standing in the room where the Mutual Criticism took place, Valesky and I conjecture about how the process went for future assassin Charles Guiteau. (In the glossary of a children’s book about the Garfield assassination, one of the vocabulary words kids are supposed to learn by studying Guiteau is “nuisance.”)

“Well,” Valesky replies, “he was here from 1860 to 1865. Then he left and came back. From what I’ve read, he was pretty annoying. He was not happy. And yet he stayed here for five years. And they let him come back and then he tries to sue them.”

Considering that Oneida’s group marriage policy theoretically promised constant sexual trysts, unfortunately for Guiteau those trysts had to be consensual. That no one wanted to sleep with Charles Guiteau is hinted at in his Oneida nickname, “Charles Gitout.” After he moved away, moved back, then moved away again to New York City, Guiteau launched a vicious lawsuit against the community, alleging that Noyes’s practice of initiating the adolescent girls into womanhood was stunting their growth, producing a generation of sexual dwarves.

Guiteau’s Noyes-worshiping father was embarrassed enough about the lawsuit to write letters to New York newspapers denouncing his son and praising the Oneida Community. Noyes, whose own son was living in a mental institution at the time, wrote to Luther Guiteau, “I have no ill will toward [Charles]. I regard him as insane, and I prayed for him last night as sincerely as I ever prayed for my own son, that is now in a Lunatic Asylum.” Soon thereafter, Luther Guiteau would reach the same conclusion, that Charles should be committed but for the lack of money to pay for it. This is important. Besides sparing the Oneida Community some grief, if Guiteau had received proper treatment from mental health professionals in a caring, padded facility with locks on the doors, it might have spared James Garfield’s life.

Here’s a distraction. When researching Luther Guiteau’s take on his son’s stay at Oneida, I couldn’t help but notice that in his letters he refers to the Oneida Community as “the O.C.” Coincidentally,
The O.C.
is the name of a nighttime soap opera on television’s Fox network I am currently obsessed with. Set in Orange County, California, the show’s three biggest stars are Peter Gallagher and Peter Gallagher’s legendary pair of eyebrows, eyebrows cozy enough to move into — a home, a couple of rocking chairs with a nose between them like a table piled high with every book you ever loved. And thus, when I see the Oneida Community being referred to as “the O.C.,” I cannot help but picture all the ladies of Oneida standing in line to curl up in Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows, trying in vain
not
to feel a special love. (The subject of Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows, I realize, is a digression away from the Oneida Community, and yet, I do feel compelled, indeed almost conspiracy theoretically bound to mention that one of the reasons the Oneida Community broke up and turned itself into a corporate teapot factory is that a faction within the group, led by a lawyer named James William Towner, was miffed that the community’s most esteemed elders were bogarting the teenage virgins and left in a huff for none other than Orange County, California, where Towner helped organize the Orange County government, became a judge, and picked the spot where the Santa Ana courthouse would be built, a courthouse where, it is reasonable to assume, Peter Gallagher’s attorney character on
The O.C.
might defend his clients.)