Southwest Indiana contains a tremendous amount of corn and cattle and vegetables and other crops and livestock. I travel on a fairly regular basis on I-64 across from St. Louis to Evansville where I generally turn south and head into Kentucky. One of the great small towns just off the interstate is New Harmony, Indiana which has quite a colorful and enlightening past.
New Harmony, Indiana was founded in 1814 by Johann Georg Rapp. Mr. Rapp headed a group of former Lutherans in forming a commune in New Harmony. They ran their community until 1924 when they sold it and moved back to Pennsylvania.
Johann Georg Rapp was born in Germany in 1757. In 1785 he led a group that broke with the Lutherans and called themselves the Harmony Society. Under pressure in Germany they came to the United States in 1803 and started their first commune in Pennsylvania, which they ran until 1814 when they sold it to the Mennonites for a great profit and moved to the small section of land just off the Wabash that would become New Harmony.
The members of the New Harmony Society were a religious commune. They were nonviolent pacifists and they dissolved all possessions and pooled all resources for the community and everyone working for the common good. It worked pretty well. Everyone was willing to work together because their religious sect believed Christ would return before the end of their lives.
They also had a strict policy of celibacy. Marriage was frowned upon. This certainly started off by giving them a very dedicated and fervent group of followers. But it made it very difficult to recruit new members. Those that left would get a small amount and sent along their way. They decided to move away because the people moving into the area did not share their values.
The New Harmony Society sold their community to Robert Owen. Robert Owen was born in Wales in 1771. He started life with a capitalist point of view but by 1817 he had fully embraced socialism. Owen brought his socialism to America with the launch of his dream and coining of the term Owenites. This was utopian socialism in the middle of Indiana.
It failed. However you slice it, the problem was the quality of the people involved in the experiment. Owen thought he could use regular, ordinary people and put them in a utopian socialist setting and have them get along. Human nature took over. The project failed within two years.
Josiah Warren was a part of that New Harmony project. He says of the community:
"We had a world in miniature — we had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. ... It appeared that it was nature's own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us ... our "united interests" were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation ..." (Periodical Letter II 1856)
Warren was born in Boston in 1798. After his failed experience with the New Harmony project he went on to found the principles of what we now know as individual anarchy, which forms the basis of so much of what is known as modern libertarian thought; things like the sovereignty of the individual.
Today New Harmony is a lovely little community with a great historical section with preserved log cabins and other historical landmarks from the days of their founding.
They have a remarkable “roofless church” that is a remarkable place to reflect on the meaning of life.
There is history all around us. Sometimes you just need to divert a few miles off the interstate.
No comments:
Post a Comment