History of American Socialisms

by John Humphrey Noyes

OWEN'S GENERAL CAREER.[ToC]

Confining ourselves strictly to memoirs of Associations, we might leave Owen now and go on to the experiments of the Fourier school. But this would hardly be doing justice to the father of American Socialisms. We have exhibited his great failure; and we must stop long enough to acknowledge his great success, and say briefly what we think of his whole life and influence. Indeed such a review is necessary to a just estimate of the Owen movement in this country.

We accept what he himself said about his early achievements, that he was under the guidance of the Spirit of God, and was carried along by a wonderful series of special providences in his first labors for the good of the working classes. The originality, wisdom and success of his doings at New Lanark were manifestly supernatural. His factory village was indeed a light to the world, that gave the nations a great lesson in practical beneficence; and shines still amid the darkness of money-making selfishness and industrial misery. The single fact that he continued the wages of his operatives when the embargo stopped his business, actually paying out $35,000 in four months, to men who had nothing to do but to oil his machinery and keep it clean, stamps him as a genius of an order higher than Napoleon. By this bold maneuver of benevolence he won the confidence of his men, so that he could manage them afterwards as he pleased; and then he went on to reform and educate them, till they became a wonder to the world and a crown of glory to himself. So far we have no doubt that he walked with inspiration and special providence.

On the other hand, it is also manifest, that his inspiration and success, so far at least as practical attempts were concerned, deserted him afterwards, and that much of the latter part of his life was spent in disastrous attempts to establish Communism, without the necessary spiritual conditions. His whole career may be likened to that of the first Napoleon, whose "star" insured victory till he reached a certain crisis; after which he lost every battle, and sunk into final and overwhelming defeat.

In both cases there was a turning-point which can be marked. Napoleon's star deserted him when he put away Josephine. Owen evidently lost his hold on practical success when he declared war against religion. In his labors at New Lanark he was not an active infidel. The Bible was in his schools. Religion was at least tolerated and respected. He there married the daughter of Mr. Dale, a preacher of the Independents, who was his best friend and counsellor through the early years of his success. But when his work at New Lanark became famous, and he rose to companionship with dukes and kings, he outgrew the modesty and practical wisdom of his early life, and undertook the task of Universal Reform. Then it was that he fell into the mistake of confounding the principles of the Bible with the character and pretensions of his ecclesiastical opposers, and so came into the false position of open hostility to religion. Christ was in a similar temptation when he found the Scribes and Pharisees arrayed against him, with the Old Testament for their vantage ground; but he had wisdom enough to keep his foothold on that vantage ground, and drive them off. His programme was, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill." Whereas Owen, at the turning-point of his career, abandoned the Bible with all its magazines of power to his enemies, and went off into a hopeless warfare with Christianity and with all God's past administrations. From that time fortune deserted him. The splendid success of New Lanark was followed by the terrible defeat at New Harmony. The declaration of war against all religion was between them. Such is our interpretation of his life; and something like this must have been his own interpretation, when he confessed in the light of his later experience, that by overlooking spiritual conditions, he had missed the most important of all the elements of human improvement.

And yet we must not push our parallel too far. Owen, unlike Napoleon, never knew when he was beaten, and fought on thirty years after his Waterloo. It would be a great mistake to imagine that the failure of New Harmony and of the attempts that followed it, was the end of Owen's achievements and influence, even in this country. Providence does not so waste its preparations and inspirations. Let us see what was left, and what Owen did, after the disasters of 1826-7.

In the first place the failure of his Community at New Harmony was not the failure of the village which he bought of the Rappites. That was built of substantial brick and stone. The houses and a portion of the population which he gathered there, remained and have continued to be a flourishing and rather peculiar village till the present time. Several Communities that came over from England in after-years made New Harmony their rendezvous, either on their arrival or when they broke up. So Macdonald, with the enthusiasm of a true Socialist, on landing in this country in 1842 first sought out New Harmony. There he found Josiah Warren, the apostle of Individualism, returned from his wanderings and failures, to set up a "Time Store" in the old seat of Socialism. We remember also, that Dr. J.R. Buchanan, the anthropologist, was at New Harmony in 1842, when he astonished the world with his novel experiments in Mesmerism, which Robert Dale Owen reported in a famous letter to the Evening Post, and which gave impetus and respectability to the beginnings of modern Spiritualism. These facts and many others indicate that New Harmony continued to be a center and refuge of Socialists and innovators long after the failure of the Community. Notwithstanding the unpopularity of Communism which Macdonald says he found there, it is probably a semi-socialist village to this day, representing more or less the spirit of Robert Owen.

In the next place, with all his failures, Owen was successful in producing a fine family; and though he himself returned to England after the disaster at New Harmony, he bequeathed all his children to this country. Macdonald, writing in 1842, says: "Mr. Owen's family all reside in New Harmony. There are four sons and one daughter; viz., William Owen, who is a merchant and bank director; Robert Dale Owen, a lawyer and politician, who attends to the affairs of the Owen Estate; David Dale Owen, a practical geologist; Richard Owen, a practical farmer; and Mrs. Fauntleroy. The four brothers, with the wives and families of three of them, live together in one large mansion."

Mr. Owen in his published journal says that "his eldest son Robert Dale Owen, after writing much that was excellent, was twice elected member of Congress, and carried the bill for establishing the Smithsonian Institute in Washington; that his second son, David Dale Owen, was professor of chemistry, mineralogy and geology, and had been employed by successive American governments as their accredited geologist; that his third son, Major Richard Owen, was a professor in a Kentucky Military College; and that his only daughter living in 1851, was the widow of a distinguished American officer."

Robert Dale Owen undoubtedly has been and is, the spiritual as well as natural successor of Robert Owen. Wiser and more moderate than his father, he has risen out of the wreck of New Harmony to high stations and great influence in this country. He was originally associated with Frances Wright in her experiment at Nashoba, her lecturing career, and her editorial labors in New York. At that time he partook of the anti-religious zeal of his father. Opposition to revivals was the specialty of his paper, the Free Enquirer. In those days, also, he published his "Moral Physiology," a little book teaching in plain terms a method of controlling propagation—not "Male Continence." This bold issue, attributed by his enemies to licentious proclivities, was really part of the socialistic movement of the time; and indicated the drift of Owenism toward sexual freedom and the abolition of marriage.