Failure at Fruitlands

PETER: We start in the summer of 1843, when a group of transcendentalists bought a 90 acre farm in rural Massachusetts and set out to recreate the Garden of Eden. They resolved to eat no animal products, drink nothing but water, and lead largely celibate lives. They hoped to create a new, more perfect society by living in harmony with nature, and so they christened the project Fruitlands.

BRIAN: The two main architects of the project were a wealthy Englishman named Charles Lane and a chronically bankrupt American named Bronson Alcott, father of the novelist Louisa May Alcott. The men were joined by a few other bright eyed converts, as well as a captive audience, Alcott’s children, and his skeptical wife Abigail.

PETER: But there was a major disagreement between Alcott and Lane. Alcott assumed that Fruitlands would be based around the old fashioned nuclear family. Lane, the one pushing celibacy, was not a family guy. He thought that Fruitlands would be a nice way to replace the biological family with a broader community based on shared ideals.

BRIAN: This disagreement simmered in the background as the Fruitlanders began their experiment. But soon the group had to grapple with more practical problems. As historian and writer Richard Francis told me recently, they weren’t exactly cut out to be farmers.

RICHARD FRANCIS: They buy this property, they want to grow fruit. Fruit is a very important part of their diet. But they managed to buy a property with hardly any fruit trees on it. And of course, if you want to set up an orchard, it takes about 15 years.

BRIAN: Right.

RICHARD FRANCIS: For your trees to get to maturity. So that wasn’t a terribly good move. And they didn’t believe in manuring the soil, because they–

BRIAN: Could you tell me why they didn’t believe in that? Was it oppressive to use manure from animals?

RICHARD FRANCIS: A, they didn’t believe in using or exploiting animals. But actually, this is a perfect example of how they’re both kind of cranky, and in certain ways, rather perceptive at the same time. And the analysis they made about manure was that fertilizing the soil led to heavy cropping. And sort of historically, this had brought about the rise of civilization.

Because once you have heavy cropping, it means that not everybody has to be a subsistence farmer, therefore some people could live in towns and cities. Cities bring about industry and smoke from chimneys, and that will cause pollution. And they actually thought the pollution would lead to climate change. And they actually said this in 1843.

However absurd they seem, one should never get away from the fact that they were genuinely engaged and worried about the problems and abuses of the society of their time. Things like the slavery question. I mean, although they wouldn’t eat and use animal products, they also wouldn’t use the products of slavery, which meant as far as their dress was concerned, not only could they not use leather or wool, but they couldn’t use cotton, either.

BRIAN: Now, Richard, you know, I cover the 20th century. We’ve got all kinds of polyester. What actually did they wear in an age before polyester, if they don’t wear cotton, and they don’t wear leather?

RICHARD FRANCIS: They wore linen.

BRIAN: Linen?

RICHARD FRANCIS: They wore linen, which is not a terribly good garment in the winter in New England.

BRIAN: No, I can imagine that.

RICHARD FRANCIS: Because it doesn’t keep the cold out.

BRIAN: Got it. All right, so let’s sum up here. They don’t have any money, they plan on eating fruit, but there are no fruit trees, and it takes 15 years to cultivate an orchard.

RICHARD FRANCIS: Yep.

BRIAN: They’re not using some of the standard techniques for cultivating. How did they survive?

RICHARD FRANCIS: Well, I suppose the actual short answer to that is that ultimately, they didn’t survive. They teetered along, they planted some crops, but almost immediately, things went wrong. In September they took it into their heads to go to New York for no particular reason that one can see, except they had a vague idea of proselytizing and getting more converts, and more people to join.

BRIAN: Sure. What better place to go if you are, in essence, providing an alternative to the evils of the city than New York?

RICHARD FRANCIS: Yeah, that’s true. But on the other hand, perhaps the ideal time if you’re setting up a farm, to go is not September when your harvest is due. So Lane and Alcott went off.

BRIAN: Oh, wait. So did everybody go to New York, or just the guys?

RICHARD FRANCIS: Well, by this time the various newcomers that had joined had sort of rather faded away, and so what they left behind, basically, was Abigail Alcott and the children. And Abigail Alcott, I think, began to get the notion that she was being exploited. Because she was constantly trying to explain, particularly to Lane, you know, that women were exploited, women should be taken seriously, and so forth.

And Lane was sort of half-heartedly endorsing these views, but there was a sort of ambiguity see because, OK, she’s left in charge of the farm. That shows a great deal of trust in her. But B, she has to do all the work, which was not exactly the point she was trying to make.

BRIAN: Yes.

RICHARD FRANCIS: And I think she began to feel that there was a triangle here, to use a famous remark by Princess Diana, there are three people in this marriage. I think that’s what she began to feel.

There was Charles Lane, her husband, and herself. And even, possibly, there’s a sort of hint that she thought that maybe that was a sort of homoerotic attraction between Alcott and Lane. Certainly she felt that it was a triangle in terms of power structures, and that she was being eased out, which she bitterly resented.

BRIAN: How did she feel about celibacy?

RICHARD FRANCIS: I’ve got a little quote, actually, here. I think this gives you the idea. She said a passionless person is to me a tame, half whole animal. Which I think makes her position fairly clear.

BRIAN: Yes.

RICHARD FRANCIS: She had tried early in the summer, she had tried to kind of buy into this notion of abstention, but she soon got fed up with that.

BRIAN: When did things actually break up, and how did the members of Fruitlands disperse?

RICHARD FRANCIS: It all went horribly wrong by December. It was a very fraught atmosphere. There’s a wonderful entry in Louisa May Alcott’s diary, she was 11 at the time, and she writes, Mr. Lane was in Boston, and we were glad. In the eve, father and mother and Anna and I had a long talk. Anna and I cried in bed, and I prayed God to keep us all together.

I think that catches the atmosphere of that time. And Lane wrote to a friend in England, and he said, to be that devil come from old England to separate husband and wife I will not be, though it might gratify New England to be able to say it. So I think you get very clear the battle lines there. The family, the Alcott family were clustering together and pushing Lane out.

And then Abigail Alcott did something very bold, really. Basically, the mortgage on the house became due. Of course, they couldn’t pay the installment. The mortgage was guaranteed by her brother, Samuel May, and although we don’t have the letter anymore, it is fairly clear from letters we do have that she wrote to him and basically said, don’t honor the mortgage.

BRIAN: Right. So she said, let’s pull the plug on this experiment.

RICHARD FRANCIS: Let’s pull the plug. Yep. I don’t think Bronson Alcott would ever have known that she was the one who pulled the plug, but it’s fairly clear that she did.

BRIAN: I want you to help me understand the elements of Fruitlands that were really communal. The notion of all these people living together, breaking down, at least in theory, if not in practice, a lot of traditional boundaries. Are there any legacies in the social realm?

RICHARD FRANCIS: This seem a strange thing to say, but I kind of one of the legacies was actually what you might call the suburban ideal. That is to say–

BRIAN: I didn’t see that coming, Richard.

RICHARD FRANCIS: Well, what I mean by that is that when it all splits up, the Alcotts went back to Concord, settled down, and what basically Alcott did, and was actually very good at it, he became a gardener. You know, everything, in a sense, has to be invented, and I think the notion of a kind of suburban family ideal is a sort of Utopian dream in itself, and one that came in during the later 19th century.

BRIAN: Very interesting.

RICHARD FRANCIS: For something like Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and her other books, celebrating the family group as this group that will cling together through thick and thin, I think that is a legitimate outcome of Fruitlands insofar as they blurred the distinction of what a family is.

They grew to learn, to value the actual sort of biological family unit, so it might not have been a kind of completely logical outcome of the community, but nevertheless I think it was a sort of human outcome. You know, that they developed this kind of intense family loyalty.

BRIAN: Richard Francis is the author of Fruitlands, The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia. It’s time for a short break, but don’t go away. When we get back, a Gilded Age railroad tycoon builds a capitalist utopia, but his workers aren’t depressed.