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IV

The Communitarian Alternative

REJECTING BOTH POLITICS AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT as the forums for their reformist impulses, Gaston and, his friends found the direction they were seeking in the country’s rich communitarian tradition. Here they found what they believed would be a practical means of putting their ideas into practice.

For at least a century dissatisfied and idealistic Americans, men and women with utopian dreams and bold plans, had tried out their ideas in experimental communities. They had created self-contained societies set apart from the larger world, established as a haven for themselves and as models of what the larger society might become. Some of these communities, like New Harmony and Brook Farm, had become internationally famous demonstrations of the ideas of Robert Owen and of Charles Fourier, the two most prominent theoreticians of communitarian socialism. These and other pre-Civil War experiments were inspirations to many of Gaston’s contemporaries. They believed that such experiments were especially relevant in the 1880s. The idea of “reform by nucleation,” as one historian puts it, “held promise for a new generation of reformers.” ⁵² Albert Brisbane, a follower of Fourier and one of the most famous of the antebellum communitarians, had expressed the hope of communitarinism this way: “The reform we contemplate . . . will change quietly and by substitution what is false and defective. ... It can moreover be tried on a small scale, and it will only spread when practice has shown its superiority over the present system.” ⁵³

Gaston probably made no count of the number of communitarian experiments that had been tried, and scholars today differ in their estimates, but a cautious historian might hazard that over two hundred had been established in the previous hundred years. Reading the reform press and exchanging letters with community builders in other parts of the country, Gaston was excited by accounts of new efforts. His own age, he believed, was wonderfully suited for a new flowering of the communitarian tradition.⁵⁴

Two colonies emerging from the ferment of that decade particularly appealed to Gaston, and the Investigating Club studied them carefully. The first was the Credit Foncier of Sinaloa, founded in 1886 by Albert Kimsey Owen at Topolobampo Bay on the west coast of Mexico. Based on a plan called “integral cooperation,” Owen’s colony combined influences of Fourier and his French disciple, Jean-Baptiste André Godin, with his own swashbuckling socialism. Owen dreamed of servicing freight and passenger traffic from the United States to China by creating a great Pacific City as the terminus of a transcontinental railroad. He won financial backing from the Kansas socialist millionaire Christian B. Hoffman and journalistic support from the feminist novelist and communitarian reformer Marie Howland and her husband, Edward Howland. The appeal of Topolobampo to Gaston—at least the description of what it was to be that he read in Owen’s book Integral Cooperation—is easy to understand. In these pages he learned of the plans for achieving harmony and equality through socialized production and distribution, cooperative housekeeping and child rearing, broad avenues and spacious public parks—a perfect integration of architecture and ideology that would blossom in a rich intellectual and cultural life. Gaston never went to Topolobampo, but he learned later of a reality that was painfully different from the dream. Primitive physical facilities strained daily life and the cooperative spirit was regularly vitiated by petty human jealousies, conflicting personal values, and power struggles that presaged the colony’s demise in the 1890s. He would learn from both the dream and the reality.⁵⁵

A second, and more important, model that Gaston chose to study was the Kaweah Cooperative Colony Company of Tulare County, California. Established in a forest of giant sequoias in 1886, Kaweah advertised itself to be “a practical democratic co-operative commonwealth founded upon the principles of Laurence Gronlund’s ‘Cooperative Commonwealth’ and Edward Bellamy’s ‘Looking Backward.’” The driving forces behind it were Burnette G. Haskell and James J. Martin, San Francisco labor leaders. Haskell, the more influential of the two, claimed to be a Marxist and an anarchist. Both men were inspired by Gronlund’s Cooperative Commonwealth, and late in 1884 they and sixty-eight of their followers drew up plans for a colony based on a scheme of hierarchical democracy advocated by Gronlund—election of officers from below, by the workers, and removal from above by superiors. The constitution also provided for an elaborate array of industrial departments to assure accountability for every colony activity, and an equalitarian system of rewards. All labor received thirty cents an hour; those who did not work were not paid. Payment was not in cash, but in time-checks, a unit of credit stated in minutes worked, that formed a circulating medium within the colony. Modified and simplified with experience, the organizational scheme that Gaston studied in 1890 appeared to him to be democratic enough, with ultimate power residing in the membership, and he spoke approvingly of the general plan for cooperative production and distribution.⁵⁶

Bellamy became a second intellectual guide for the Kaweahans after Looking Backward was published. While Gronlund became a non-resident member, Bellamy, according to the colony’s historian, “shook his head over Kaweah; no such experiment,” he thought, “could succeed on less than a national scale.” Bellamy’s followers, many of whom translated his teachings into communitarian efforts, were obviously not of a mind with their mentor and a goodly number of them made their way to California to join the colony, share in the hardships of pioneer life and relax under the huge sequoia they called the Karl Marx Tree.

Gaston eagerly read accounts of the experiment and unsuccessfully attempted to swap advertising in his newspaper for rail transportation to San Francisco. Although he was unable to raise money to visit Kaweah, he continued to be enthusiastic about the colony’s “admirable plan” and proclaimed it to be of interest to “all who are studying the social and industrial problem of the day.” By the end of 1890, however, word reached him of bitter quarrels in the colony as well as material setbacks. “I have followed with sorrow the development of the dissensions in Kaweah,” Gaston wrote. “I believe its founders to be men of pure and lofty aims, . . . but the mind capable of planning is not always capable of executing.” ⁵⁷

Young though he was, Gaston thought of himself as the kind of practical idealist who could both plan and execute. That faith would now meet its first test. By July 1890, he and his friends had put on paper and were ready to publicize the blueprint for their own utopia. The Des Moines newspapers carried long descriptions of their proposed “National Co-operative Company” and before the month was out press notices had appeared in perhaps a score of other cities, most of them announcing a new attempt to institute the “Bellamy Plan.” ⁵⁸ News of the projected colony excited interest throughout the country; soon cards and letters were pouring into Des Moines, asking for particulars, sharing with Gaston tales of exploitation and distress, and expressing a deep faith in cooperation. Gaston was obviously moved by the wave of interest and the extent of human suffering and injustice it bespoke. He would not forget these letters.

Letter from the Kaweah Co-Operative Colony.

From Germany came a plea to be permitted to join in the effort to implement “Bellamy’s excellent ideas,” promising warm enthusiasm from “thousands of efficient industrious Europeans, slaves of the capitalists who are thirsting for freedom.” A Russian immigrant wrote from Kansas City that he had already lost his child, wife, and property, that he was going more deeply into debt, was “cracked” in health, and had “come to bedrock.” He said he would “thank my God if you, friends of humanity, will give me chance to associate with you in this great movement for delivering humanity from beasthood to humanity.” Another European immigrant, whose home and mill had been burned down by the Jesse and Frank James gang, wrote from New Orleans of his struggle to maintain his socialist principles. He hoped he would receive his “reward by getting a chance to work with you.” ⁵⁹ Letters from these immigrants, who had come to America to find greater freedom and opportunity, underscored the ironic fate America held for them.

By October, upwards of a hundred persons from twenty-one states had written to express interest.⁶⁰ Most were native born—workingmen, tradesmen, and farmers. All but two or three were men. Some wrote eloquently; some had difficulty spelling or forming their letters correctly; a few were veterans of other cooperative colony ventures; and some wrote learnedly about the advantages of competing economic doctrines. All agreed that the United States was not the land of opportunity its resources, mythology, and history intended it to be. To see America through their eyes touched the young idealist who received their letters; it also deepened his resolve to find the explanation for their grief and the answer to their plight.

Gaston wrote long and solicitous letters to most of these correspondents. Taking on the j ob of colony secretary, he meticulously made copies of his replies in a newly acquired journal.⁶¹ These were heady months for Gaston as he engaged for the first time the minds and hearts of those who, he hoped, would be the sinew of his practical demonstration of a new route to the cooperative commonwealth.

He and Clara had two children by this time, after the birth of James Ernest in June. But the increased family responsibilities do not seem to have either altered his course or slowed him down, if one is to judge from the many long and thoughtful letters he drafted, often late in the night after his family had gone to sleep. These letters reveal a man possessed by his mission. In them he mixed soaring enthusiasm for the colony venture—“the almost universal opinion of those who have studied our plan is that it is the simplest, best, and most practical ever put forth”—with fearful warnings of the evil it must combat. Every day, in fact, the threat to the nation was growing stronger and more menacing he believed. In replying to one letter, he wrote of “individualism and competition gone to seed” as the defining characteristic of the country; people were rewarded for selfish activities in a society that not only approved but depended upon the subjugation of the many to the few. The “present competitive system,” he wrote to another prospective member, allowed individuals to engage in whatever they believed they “can get money out of without regard to the needs of the community.” Success came by levying tribute on their fellow citizens “through control of natural opportunities,” by becoming monopolists. “One of the worst fruits of the present system,” he said to another prospective colonist, was the way it drained the sense of self-worth out of many honest people, robbing them “of all confidence in . . . humanity.” He admonished his brother-in-law, a mildly skeptical merchant, telling him that it was not possible, under the existing competitive system, for “a man to do business a day without being compelled to do things which are repugnant to his moral sense.” ⁶²