American Utopia, French Flair

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

PETER: And I’m Peter Onuf. In 1808, a reclusive French philosopher named Charles Fourier published a book, The Theory of the Four Movements. In it, he sketched a plan for building an ideal community. The community would be cooperative and self sustaining, with fair wages for work and equality between the sexes.

ED: Fourier based his plan on observations of human nature, and some rather complicated mathematics. He calculated that each community, he called them phalanxes, should house exactly 1,620 people. That number, he wrote, would allow for a perfect balance of personalities, and the result would be total social harmony.

BRIAN: And things would only get better from there. Fourier predicted that diseases would essentially disappear. People would live to be 144 years old.

CARL GUARNERI: And human beings would develop long tails that would be a useful appendage.

PETER: That’s Carl Guarneri, a historian at St. Mary’s College. He says that Fourier had plenty of other predictions about the future that awaited successful phalanxes, like the idea that six moons would eventually orbit the Earth.

BRIAN: Fourier wrote that familiar animals would evolve into gigantic creatures, like the anti-crocodile, which would paddle human passengers across rivers. He even predicted global warming. Sort of.

CARL GUARNERI: The warmth would melt the polar ice cap. Not too far off, actually, from what’s happening now, except that he believed that would sort of give the seas a sugary, salty taste that would be something like lemonade, and make them drinkable.

PETER: But to turn this Utopian theory into reality, Fourier needed money.

BRIAN: The story goes that Fourier had announced that he would return to his apartment every day at noon to await the candidate, the benefactor who would fund one of his grand communal experiments.

ED: That’s when Albert Brisbane entered the picture. He was a young, wealthy Americans who fancied himself a budding intellectual. On an 1830s tour across Europe, he planned to meet with all the continent’s great thinkers, including Fourier. Now, Brisbane really did take to the Frenchman’s ideas, but he also saw Fourier’s Utopian dreams as an opportunity.

This was his chance to be the all important messenger, the guy who would spread the good news across the world. And what better place to start than back home in the United States? Brisbane knew that his practical countrymen would not go for some of Fourier’s stranger predictions, so he shrewdly edited Fourier’s ideas, losing the wackier ones. What was left was a step by step program for building your own phalanx.

PETER: At many times in US history, this would still have been a hard sell. Fourier was a radical, and a foreigner. But Brisbane’s return to the US was perfectly timed. Americans were reeling from the economic panic of 1837. Many were out of work, and scared of what looked like a grim, industrial future.

BRIAN: Americans who kept abreast of foreign events, and the newspapers were full of them back then, could read about the so-called dark, satanic mills of Manchester, where generations would be consigned to grimy work in factories, and it was felt that that kind of society might be coming to the United States, and there was this window of opportunity before it entrenched itself to try something else.

ED: So Brisbane got to work, arguing that Fourierism was just the thing that these anxious Americans needed. He published books, gave lectures, and wrote a column in an influential New York newspaper. Everywhere he went, he sang the praises of the phalanx. And Americans were willing to give it a try.

Within a few years, over two dozen phalanxes were organized across the country. There was La Reunion, Texas, Utopia, Ohio, and the boringly named North American Phalanx in New Jersey. In the 1840s and 1850s, over 10,000 Americans joined these communities.

PETER: None of the phalanxes lasted more than a few years, and to our knowledge, the oceans have not yet turned to lemonade. But Brisbane had accomplished in America what Fourier had never managed in France. He’d gotten large numbers of ordinary people to try out a project of radical social change, which, in its own way, is just as remarkable.

ED: So today on the show we’re asking why America has been such a fruitful ground for Utopian projects. Is there a particularly American brand of Utopian thinking? How do Utopian thinkers balance the desire to reform society with a desire to remove themselves from it? And is the United States itself a Utopian project?