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Summary
Summary
A fascinating and unusual chapter in American history about a religious community that held radical notions of equality, sex, and religion--only to transform itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century, into a successful silverware company and a model of buttoned-down corporate propriety.
In the early nineteenth century, many Americans were looking for an alternative to the Puritanism that had been the foundation of the new country. Amid the fervor of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, John Humphrey Noyes, a spirited but socially awkward young man, attracted a group of devoted followers with his fiery sermons about creating Jesus' millennial kingdom here on Earth. Noyes established a revolutionary community in rural New York centered around achievinga life free of sin through God's grace, while also espousing equality of the sexes and "complex marriage," a system of free love where sexual relations with multiple partners was encouraged. Noyes's belief in the perfectibility of human nature eventually inspired him to institute a program of eugenics, known as stirpiculture, that resulted in a new generation of Oneidans who, when the Community disbanded in 1880, sought to exorcise the ghost of their fathers' disreputable sexual theories. Converted into a joint-stock company, Oneida Community, Limited, would go on to become one of the nation's leading manufacturers of silverware, and their brand a coveted mark of middle-class respectability in pre- and post-WWII America.
Told by a descendant of one of the Community's original families, Ellen Wayland-Smith's Oneida is a captivating story that straddles two centuries to reveal how a radical, free-love sect, turning its back on its own ideals, transformed into a purveyor of the white-picket-fence American dream.
Author Notes
Ellen Wayland-Smith teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California, and received her PhD. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. A descendent of John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the Oneida community, she lives in Los Angeles with her family. Oneida is her first book.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this impressively thorough and engaging work, Wayland-Smith tells the story of the Oneida Community, a 19th-century utopian Christian commune that later became known for silverware manufacturing. The author, a descendent of community founder John Humphry Noyes, combines stellar research with exceptional critical analysis that considers the community in light of the work of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and George Bernard Shaw. Organized in upstate New York in 1848, Oneida was marked by a practical approach to finances and countercultural religious beliefs, including free love or "complex marriage." A schism split the religious community and it dissolved as Noyes grew old, but his descendants continued to run Oneida's business operations-primarily silk, animal trap, and iron spoon factories. Their spoon factory soon shone brightest, becoming one of the top silverware companies in the country until its 2006 bankruptcy. Wayland-Smith demonstrates that Oneida was very much a product of its time, placing the community in the context of the Second Great Awakening and the expansion of American capitalism while highlighting Noyes's incorporation of communism, utopianism, eugenics, and spiritualism (among other aspects of industrial modernism) into his belief system. This book is a fascinating look into the strange history of Oneida silverware and how its origins reflect an exhilarating period of American history. Agent: Rob McQuilkin, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Notorious in the nineteenth century for its practice of free love and open marriage, the Oneida commune of upstate New York is better known in the present for its business operations, the famous silverware company. Long gone is the sharing of all work, wealth, and governance. Long gone also is the committee that scheduled couplings of its men and women. By the start of the twentieth century, the utopian agricultural commune following the radical religious ideals of John Humphrey Noyes, a proponent of communism and eugenics who coined the term free love, had become a mainstream manufacturing corporation run by its descendants, an inbred tangle of families trying to forget their past. Despite a secretly executed bonfire of most of Oneida's early documents in the 1940s, the story survives. Drawing from letters, diaries, newsletters, and family stories, the author, an original-family descendant, adds inside information to this retelling of a radical movement's transformation in the shifting current of American ideals. The narrative is engaging and detailed. This is a must-read for those interested in American social history, and should have broad appeal to readers who enjoy microhistories.--Roche, Rick Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Established in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes in upstate New York, Oneida was imagined as a shining Perfectionist utopia, free from the tarnish of conventional morality ("sticky love") and repressive social structures. But as Wayland-Smith (herself a descendant of Noyes) reveals in her first book, "Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table," there are plenty of skeletons in the family china closet. The commune was a radical enterprise, a heady mixture of "spiritual interchange" and sexual intercourse, where physical "proprietorship" between man and wife was replaced by "complex marriage." Beyond the bedroom, there was collective child-rearing and "industrial communion." But recreating heaven on earth came with costs, not only financial pressures, but also crises of faith and that particular "demon of disobedience," sexual entanglements. Noyes and his acolytes are fortunate that Wayland-Smith is a gifted writer. Her lively account of how Oneida eventually succumbed to "the gods of Science and Doubt" is a welcome change from most "as told by" family histories. A fall from grace due to the clash of egos and cultural sea changes may seem unremarkable, but the devil is in the detailed telling of Oneida's ultimate metamorphosis, which uncovers how unconventional "electric sex" eventually turned into the profitable enterprise of selling tableware. PAULA URUBURU, the author of "American Eve," teaches American literature and film studies at Hofstra University. She is currently finishing a book an Lizzie Borden.
Choice Review
In the late 1840s, after being chased out of Vermont for his radical ideas on communal life and complex marriage, lawyer and clergyman John Humphrey Noyes (a product of the Second Great Awakening) and his followers moved to Madison County, New York. There, they joined a community begun by fellow perfectionists and formed the Oneida Association. The experiment, socialist in its economy, also involved birth control and planned reproduction--an early form of eugenics. Wayland-Smith (Univ. of Southern California), a Noyes descendant, tells Noyes's story as well as that of the Oneida community while it was a communal experiment and after it disbanded in 1880 to become a joint-stock company known for its silverware products. The author shows how, over the course of two centuries, "a radical, free love sect" turned its back on its own ideals and transformed into "a purveyor of the white-picket-fence American dream." Wayland-Smith adds little to the first part of the story, which has often been told over the years. But those interested in the fate of the experiment after 1880 might find this book interesting. Summing Up: Recommended. General collections and public libraries. --Bryan F. Le Beau, University of Saint Mary
Guardian Review
How a 19th century religious experiment in free love caved in to a greater god -- capitalism In 19th-century America, a number of utopian communities, oblivious to the defeatist etymology of the word utopia (Greek for "not" plus "place", or "no-place"), were established, mostly throughout the north-east. Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), Robert Owen and a group of transcendentalists all tried their hands at creating separate communities of peace and understanding. All of these efforts failed fairly quickly. The exception was the Oneida community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes, in the Leatherstocking region of central New York state. The region had already surrendered its secrets to the young Joseph Smith when he discovered the gold books of the angel Moroni buried in a drumlin near Palmyra, and founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Oneida, which is located 80 miles to the east, provided a home for Noyes's nascent Society of Inquiry when its members fled from Putney, Vermont in the 1840s after Noyes' doctrine of "complex marriage" offended the local townspeople. Ellen Wayland-Smith is a descendant of members of the Oneida community, and in her book she details the travails of her ancestors. In the 1840s, Noyes and his followers set up the Oneida Reserve, buying land that had been confiscated from Native Americans, determined to be able to practise their communistic Christianity (in which claiming a single person as one's own was seen as antithetical to the group's wellbeing). By the 1940s, Oneida had become among the most prestigious brands of silverware and cutlery, and its owners were mortified that the public might find out about the company's free love beginnings. Wayland-Smith documents how, in an event known as "the burning", members of the family authorised the destruction of the community's records, in order to prevent the potentially embarrassing revelations from falling into the hands of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, who wanted to study how complex marriage had worked. When Noyes was born in 1811, his mother Polly prayed that he might become a "minister of the everlasting gospel". Wayland-Smith writes that Noyes' journal, written as a Dartmouth student in 1829, "provides glimpses of a teenager struggling with paralysing shyness in his relations to the opposite sex. He was further hampered by the conviction that his red hair and freckles rendered him physically repulsive." After a series of failed crushes on women whom he was too afraid to approach, and interactions with aspects of the religious revival known as the "second great awakening", Noyes converted to a type of Christianity that was obsessed with perfection and millenarian dreams: "one senses that Noyes's conversion simply provided the exhausted teenager with a welcome exit from the dark labyrinth of sexual desire, disappointment, and shame that marked his adolescence". Wayland-Smith provides details of the inner logic of Noyes's religion, including his belief that couples should enter into complex marriage. He saw sexual intercourse as an artform, something to be freely practised. The first issue to be dealt with when encouraging community members to sleep with one another was a practical one: how to control pregnancy. Noyes argued that there were two functions to sex: reproductive and pleasure production. He saw no reason why they had to be lumped together. Contraception was primitive in the mid-19th century. Noyes promoted the method of coitus reservatus or continence, that is, discontinuing intercourse at the moment prior to ejaculation. And, while the inevitable "accidents" occurred, Wayland-Smith documents that the number of births in the community was successfully limited. In later decades, however, she shows how Noyes, informed both by the new theories of evolution and the findings of Charles Darwin, plus his own sense of his specialness, constructed his own system that he called "stirpiculture" in which he determined which male-female pairs should breed to produce offspring. Wayland-Smith writes that "for all of its scientific pretensions, Oneida's experiment in stirpiculture, as narrated by private diaries by its participants, presents a dark, at times sinister, tale that is at stark odds with the triumphant march toward truth and progress it imagined itself to be". What is elided throughout the first half of the book is any understanding of how gender was playing out among the members of the Oneida community. Women were recognised to be full, intellectual members of the group, and were encouraged to develop their minds, but concomitantly, it appears that they had little voice in decisions about who they would pair with. Children were raised communally, and individual mother-child bonding was sharply discouraged. It is not clear if the records are lost, or if Wayland-Smith chose to ignore them, but several times throughout the fascinating story of the community at its peak, I wanted to know whether women -- for all their supposed intellectual freedom -- had autonomy over their hearts and bodies. In the second half of the book, Wayland-Smith devotes entire chapters to the women's stories. In one remarkable section the cultural tensions around sex are treated in detail. They partly resulted from the Comstock law of 1873, which made it a federal offense to publish anything related to contraception or "obscene literature". The law, which led to the arrests, imprisonments and even suicides of contraceptive advocates, retarded the sharing of knowledge of advances in contraception, condemning women to serial pregnancies. Noyes's book about coitus reservatus was also unavailable, although medical experts of the time had weighed in that they thought the practice led to "impotence in males, sterility in females, and nervous disease in both". In 1890, George Noyes Miller published a bestseller, a novel called The Strike of a Sex. In it, he envisioned a future city where women segregated themselves wholly from men until such time "until the men agree to relieve them of the 'fearful treadmill of enforced maternity'". Miller failed to mention how the men invented such a method because to have included that detail would have subjected himself to Comstock regulations. But the book sold 35,000 copies in America and Europe. After dealing with the gender question, Wayland-Smith provides fascinating detail about how Oneida, which by this time had started manufacturing silverware as a means of supporting itself, revolutionised advertising. It created a sort of desire economy, in which the ads for the silverware promised happiness, marital bliss and, eventually, middle class respectability if the buyers set their tables with Oneida community silverware. She also provides a sad account of how the communism of the original Oneida businesses evolved, becoming more capitalist as time moved forward. Workers continued to be treated well by the family, but the vulture capitalism of the late 20th century destroyed the company. In presenting a biography of the Oneida community, rather than of just its founder, Wayland-Smith provides a provocative portrait of the changes in American culture. The community was able to withstand 19th-century pressures to change its sexual behaviour so that it would be more in line with an ideal of monogamous bliss. And yet, later, it could not resist the middle class pressure to conform. No longer tied to its religious roots, Oneida caved into a greater god: capitalism. Wayland-Smith provides a detailed, riveting account of yet another form of the American tragedy. - Lorraine Berry.
Kirkus Review
A study of the unlikely origins of one of America's most recognizable brands.For many, little bears the white, middle-class stamp of approval of monogamy more than the timeless wedding gift of silver. But Wayland-Smith (Writing/Univ. of Southern California), great-granddaughter of the former vice president and treasurer of Oneida Limited, unearths the eyebrow-raising history of the rural New York free love-espousing community that spawned one of this country's top silverware makers. Founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, the Oneida Community brought together a tightknit group of Christian religious dissenters who, for 30 years, pooled their assets and lived as one in a "commune-cum-capitalist powerhouse." Wayland-Smith carefully details the rich biography of Noyes, the fascinating sex-obsessed theologian who had his minister's license from Yale Divinity revoked after he began subscribing to Perfectionism, the belief that a sinner could "not only reform himself by making the right moral choices but also be made perfect'free from sinsimply by accepting God's grace." Finding the traditional definition of Christian marriage too confining, Noyes proceeded to fashion his doctrine to practice eugenics and allow forindeed to celebratecompletely open relationships, which had the somewhat unintended effect of dissolving (for a time) the strictures of traditional 19th-century gender roles for women. Oneida women were able to undertake the same jobs as their male counterparts and encouraged to shun the restrictive, corseted stays of Victorian dress for more practical attire. The narrative is occasionally dry, but the author offers as in-depth an account as possible of Oneida origins, given that, in 1947, unknown persons burned the community's historical records in an attempt to purge the by-then well-respected industrial giant of its racy past. The spotlight she shines on this remarkable community's beginnings and ending offers a riveting glimpse into the quintessentially American early-19th-century struggle with the rights of the individual and separation of church and state. A smartly contextualized tale of "the tension between radical social critique and unapologetic accommodation...between communal harmony and individual striving." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In the early 19th century, an odd, socially awkward, and unlikely leader named John Humphrey Noyes (1811-86), similar to other self-proclaimed ministers of the Second Great Awakening, claimed to have exclusive knowledge about Jesus's millennial kingdom. Noyes believed in the perfectibility of human nature and built an intricate revolutionary community of free love and equality. The Oneidans grew to fairly modest but self-sustaining numbers and eventually built businesses to support their way of life. One of these enterprises included flatware. After the Oneidans disbanded in 1880, they converted to a joint-stock company and Oneida Community Limited (now known as Oneida Limited) would become one of the most well-respected brands of silverware for middle-class American families. Author Wayland-Smith is a descendant of Noyes and teaches writing at the University of Southern California. VERDICT This compelling narrative seamlessly threads the unlikely alliance between a "free love utopia" and a household brand name. Fans of Joseph Ellis and David McCullough will appreciate this engrossing entry.-Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. 1 |
1 A Minister Is Born | p. 7 |
2 Noyes in the Underworld | p. 24 |
3 New Jerusalem (in Vermont) | p. 36 |
4 Electric Sex; or, How to Live Forever | p. 50 |
5 Marriage Grows Complex | p. 64 |
6 The Machine in the Garden | p. 85 |
7 Sticky Love | p. 104 |
8 Brave New World | p. 121 |
9 Twilight of the Gods | p. 143 |
10 Things Fall Apart | p. 161 |
11 Selling Silver | p. 184 |
12 Survival of the Fittest | p. 203 |
13 "The Strike of a Sex" | p. 225 |
14 "Back Home for Keeps" | p. 242 |
15 The Burning | p. 254 |
Epilogue | p. 261 |
Notes | p. 271 |
Bibliography | p. 289 |
Acknowledgments | p. 295 |
Index | p. 297 |