Thy Neighbor's Wife (36 page)

Before his death in Paris in 1837, Fourier had lectured and published works asserting that nineteenth-century man’s inherent greed and destructive nature could not be curtailed and made compatible with the highest goals of world capitalism unless the system of Western civilization was radically altered. Fourier proposed that national leaders divide the populations of their lands into separate groups numbering approximately 1,600 people, each group living and working within a kind of grand industrial hotel, or “phalanstery,” that would fulfill all of a citizen’s private and professional needs.

Ideally each phalanstery would be six stories high, cheerfully decorated and comfortably furnished, with separate wings for work enterprises and other wings for social or domestic activities. While regents would supervise the income earning within each phalanstery, individuals would perform at jobs that they did best, though they periodically would be rotated to avoid boredom; and everyone would receive a minimum wage and possibly a higher wage commensurate with their greater productivity or talent. The cost of renting apartments in the phalanstery would vary, depending on the size of the apartment and the luxuries it contained; and if tenants wished to occupy the more expensive apartments but could not afford the higher rent, they could make up the difference by working longer hours. While upward mobility through greater production was encouraged, no member of a Fourieristic community could be socially ostracized for a lack of
industriousness, nor was any member expected to feel sexual frustration or deprivation: Even the least physically attractive were guaranteed a “sexual minimum” by the “erotic saints” who would make themselves available in private suites set aside for such purposes.

Monogamy among couples was discouraged by Fourier, who also felt that the nuclear family was a detriment to utopianism because it promoted possessiveness, nepotism, inward-thinking, and a narrow view of life that blurred the grander vision of mankind. Although Fourier was unable during his lifetime to raise sufficient capital to construct even a single phalanstery, certain of his ideas were considered meritorious and even practical by such influential Americans as Albert Brisbane, who had met Fourier in Paris and whose book
The Social Destiny of Man
brought Fourier to the attention of the editor of the New York
Tribune
, Horace Greeley, who in turn invited Brisbane to use the columns of the
Tribune
to popularize the theories and fantasies of Charles Fourier; and thus did Fourierism become a minor fad in America.

During the early 1840s, dozens of Fourier-inspired experiments were begun by various Utopians, escapists, and advocates of free love. Occupying large rambling houses on remote farms or in the outer thickets of towns and villages in the Northeast, the Midwest, and as far west as Texas, people sought to earn a collective livelihood through horticulture, small businesses, crafts, and light industries; but few of these associations survived for more than two years because they were undercapitalized, hastily organized, and soon splintered by disruptive factions.

Perhaps the best known of these settlements, though it was relatively discreet sexually, was the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, a six-year venture begun in 1841 ten miles from Boston in West Roxbury, and historically remembered mostly for having among its early members an aspiring young writer who had recently lost his job at the Boston Custom House—Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Earning his room and board by working on the farm, Hawthorne was at first enthralled by the rural experience and tran
scendental atmosphere, and even after spending a day in the field that was largely devoted to the spreading of manure he was able to write in a letter to a friend: “There is nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in this sort of toil as thou wouldst think. It defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul. This gold ore is a pure and wholesome substance; else our Mother Nature would not devour it so readily, and derive so much nourishment from it, and return such a rich abundance of good grain and roots in requital of it.”

But soon, within six months, Hawthorne had abandoned Brook Farm, convinced that the community was diverting him from his literary ambitions. “Romance and poetry,” he later wrote, “…need ruin to make them grow.” And in his novel of 1852,
The Blithedale Romance
, which was inspired by Brook Farm, he suggested that in communal living people tended to become
too
close,
too
aware of one another’s vibrations and personal piques: “…an unfriendly state of feeling could not occur between any two members, without the whole society being more or less commoted and made uncomfortable thereby…. If one of us happened to give his neighbor a box on the ear, the tingle was immediately felt on the same side of everybody’s head. Thus, even on the supposition that we were far less quarrelsome than the rest of the world, a great deal of time was necessarily wasted in rubbing our ears.”

Although John Humphrey Noyes was familiar with the Fourieristic movement, and had also visited during the 1830s free-love communes in such places as Brimfield, Massachusetts, he preferred to believe that he had little in common with the sexual radicals and social reformers of his day; he felt instead that he was divinely directed, was a spiritual messenger appointed to assist God on earth to establish a religion that would inspire people to love their neighbors truly and completely. Unlike the fanciful Fourier, or the itinerant intellectuals and writers who had visited Brook Farm—a group that included Thoreau and Emerson, Henry James and Margaret Fuller, Brisbane and Greeley—
Noyes was not a theoretical Utopian or advocate of individual freedoms; he was a committed communist, an absolutist, a theocrat who wished to purge the sin of selfishness from the souls of men and to convert them to what he called “Bible Communism.” While he denounced egotism in other people, Noyes’s own ego was monumental; and yet he invariably justified his many preferences and pronouncements, including his interdiction of monogamous marriage, as being in concert with the teachings of the Bible.

“In the Kingdom of Heaven,” he wrote, “the institution of marriage which assigns the exclusive possession of one woman to one man does not exist [Matt. 22:23–30] for in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are as the Angels of God in Heaven…. The abolishment of sexual exclusiveness is involved in the love-relation required between all believers by the express injunction of Christ and the apostles and by the whole tenor of the New Testament…. The restoration of true relations between the sexes is a matter second in importance only to the reconciliation of man to God. Bible Communists are operating in this order. Their main work, since 1834, has been to develop the religion of the New Covenant and establish union with God….”

Noyes’s reference to 1834 was significant; it was in that year that he became convinced of his spiritual perfection, a state of sinlessness that had been evolving within him for nearly three years—since he had first received a God sign after attending a fiery and frenzied four-day revivalist rally held near his home in Putney, Vermont. At the time of the rally, in 1831, he was twenty years old, an ambitious and driven law student, though uncertain about his purpose; but after the rally he recalled: “Light gleamed upon my soul in a different way from what I had expected. It was dim and almost imperceptible at first but in the course of the day it attained meridian splendor. Ere the day was done I had concluded to devote myself to the service and ministry of God.”

He enrolled at the Andover Theological Seminary, but quit
after one year because he believed that the seminarians lacked seriousness; he then registered at the Yale Divinity School, where he studied intensely, argued often with his peers and the faculty over biblical interpretation, and revealed a passion about religion that one contemporary likened to “an acute fever.” Soon some of his privately expressed theories at Yale were interpreted by other students as symptoms of a neurotic and heretical temperament-such as his belief that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was not a future event but had already happened during the destruction of Jerusalem in
A.D.
70, at which time mankind had been saved from sin. Thus, in Noyes’s view, the Kingdom of God had at that time been established on earth and was still omnipresent in the atmosphere, and was viable in the souls of true believers; and, like the traveling evangelists that he had heard in New England advocating Perfectionism, Noyes was convinced that a person could, after a religious conversion, be spiritually perfect and answerable not to mundane moral laws, but to the mind of the Lord—and Noyes further believed that such a person was himself.

This he publicly acknowledged one day in February 1834 while preaching in the New Haven Free Church, causing a scandal and resulting almost immediately in the revocation of his license as a Congregationalist minister. Without a church at his disposal, Noyes wandered through New England and upstate New York preaching in the outdoors and recruiting followers. Hoping to attract distinguished colleagues and perhaps financial support to his cause, Noyes approached, without success, such men as the abolitionist and editor of the
Liberator
, William Lloyd Garrison, who had recently been attacked and almost lynched by a proslavery mob in Boston; and the controversial though well-endowed Presbyterian clergyman Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, whom Lincoln would call “the greatest orator since Saint Paul” but who would be better remembered as the defendant in the celebrated adultery trial involving Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton.

In addition to Noyes’s personal proselytizing, he promulgated
his religious ideas in a magazine that he cofounded called
The Perfectionist
, where he attracted the readership of many freethinkers, antinomians, and other rebels against convention, including an earnest and well-to-do young Vermont woman whose grandfather had served as the lieutenant governor of the state. Her name was Harriet Holton, and she had first become aware of Noyes through his writings about the Second Coming of Christ.

Soon she began a correspondence with Noyes and later donated substantial sums of money to his movement. Since her parents were dead, her grandparents and family friends sought to discourage her involvement with Perfectionism, but she was intrigued with Noyes’s philosophy and became attracted to him personally after their first meeting, being neither discouraged nor disturbed by his views on marriage and monogamy even when he warned her in a letter: “We can enter into no engagement with each other which shall limit the range of our affections as they are limited in matrimonial engagements by the fashions of the world.”

Noyes further emphasized his opposition to monogamy in a letter published in a free-thought journal that described his concept of an ideal marital relationship:

Harriet Holton understood and accepted Noyes’s doctrine, and in 1838, after their marriage in Putney, they began to invite to their home other religious couples who were interested in the Bible and might become future converts to Perfectionism. Within
a few years they had befriended a half-dozen couples who subscribed, at least in theory, to Perfectionism; and of this group the most fervent and physically attractive were Mary and George Cragin.

Before moving to Putney in 1840, the Cragins had associated with free-love cultists in upstate New York, and had earlier served as evangelical workers in the congregation of the famous revivalist Charles G. Finney. Finney was a tall, energetic preacher with an exuberant manner and wide-ranging choral voice; and as he traveled through New York State piously flagellating from the pulpit, he often provoked his audiences to outbursts of tears and distemper, shrieking and fainting—and violent threats and brandished fists directed at Finney himself. Though his methods were deplored by many of his colleagues in the Presbyterian ministry, Finney was nonetheless credited with converting great masses of sinners throughout the western areas of the state, and his appeal was no less compelling after he arrived in New York City in the early 1830s to preach at a new church especially designed for him, the Broadway Tabernacle.

It was there that George Cragin, as a member of the Tabernacle congregation and one of Finney’s sabbath school teachers, became acquainted with another of Finney’s volunteers, a slim and lovely young woman from Maine named Mary Johnson. After a year’s courtship, they were married in 1834 at a festive ceremony in New York attended only by devout believers, after which the couple drove off in a horse-drawn mail coach to a honeymoon in Newark. Although Mary and George Cragin had both come from prosperous New England homes, their religious fanaticism limited their family ties, and parental misfortune had greatly reduced their expected inheritance; and, since George Cragin lacked business ambition—and had also rejected a promising job as a European agent for a New York firm because he regarded his would-be employer as an infidel—the Cragins were
forced to live frugally in New York and to seek solace mainly in spiritual comfort.

But this, too, was disrupted after 1837 when their temporal leader, Charles Finney, left New York for Oberlin, Ohio, where he founded a theological department at the new college, and eventually became Oberlin’s president. The Cragins drifted with diminished enthusiasm to other revivalists, failing to recover their religious zeal until, while in Vermont in 1840, they came under the influence of John Humphrey Noyes, whose religious commune was in an early stage of formation.