I suppose that the average professional man invests ten thousand dollars in a home (or else pays rent equal to interest upon that sum); and that he pays two thousand dollars a year living expenses for his family. Let a hundred such families combine to found a coöperative home, and there would be a million dollars for building and equipment, and two hundred thousand dollars a year for running expenses; I believe that for half the outlay five hundred people could live and enjoy comforts at present possible only to millionaires. I have, however, no intention of asking anyone to risk his money upon such a guess. I write this to find out if there are people disposed to consider the project; and if there are enough, I will have the plan figured upon by architects, contractors, stewards, and other qualified experts, and have prepared a definite business proposition, and a plan of organisation for a stock company.
The following embodies my own conception of what such a “home colony” should be. It would be located within an hour of New York, and would have one hundred families, and three or four hundred acres of land, healthfully located, near some body of water, and as unspoiled by the hand of man as possible. It should have an abundant water supply and a filtering plant; an electric light and power plant, and a large garden and farm, raising its own stock, meat, poultry, fruit and vegetables, and canning the last for winter use. It should be administered by a board of directors, democratically elected. For the management of its various departments salaried experts should be employed; machinery should be installed wherever it could be made to pay, and the best modern methods should be applied in every industry. All its purchases should be in bulk and tested for quality; and, so far as the preparation and serving of food is concerned, the processes should be kept as aseptic as a surgical operation.
We are accustomed to having our buildings for public purposes endowed by persons with a great deal of money and few ideals; and so we consume much space and material and accomplish little, exactly typifying our civilisation. The buildings of this home colony should be of frame at the outset, of simple and expressive design, each structure exactly adapted to its specific purpose. The buildings should be conveniently grouped—those for the children in one place, those for cooking and eating in another, those for reading, for music and social intercourse, for recreation and exercise, in still other places. The greater part of the land would of course be given up to farm and woodland, and to the individual dwellings of the families. The ground available for this latter purpose should be divided into lots, priced according to size and location, and eased to stockholders for long terms. Each would erect his own home, according to his own taste—a home, of course, of a kind hitherto unknown, with no provision for the cooking of food, or the training of children, or other trades and professions. It would be a place where the family met, to rest and play and sleep. It might be large or small, anything that the owner chose to make it—my own would be a four- or five-room cottage, of rustic design, and it would cost from six to eight hundred dollars. Besides these there should be apartment buildings, owned by the colony, and dormitories with rooms for single men and women.
As to the public buildings, there should be a large and beautiful dining hall, and a modern, scientifically constructed kitchen. There should be separate tables for each family, or for congenial groups of people. The service should be unexceptionable, the food simple, but perfect in quality and preparation; there should be a vegetarian service for those who prefer this cheaper mode of life, and the charge for board should be based upon the cost of the service. As to what the cost would be, with a colony raising nearly all its own food upon the premises, I can only submit three experiences of my own: First, it cost me for my family of three to board in New York City, in one room and in the cheapest way, a thousand dollars a year. Second, it cost us, living in a three-room cottage in the country, doing our own work and buying our food from a farmer at wholesale prices, seven hundred dollars a year. Third, it cost us, living upon a sixty-acre farm, which represented a total investment of four thousand dollars, doing no work ourselves but the managing, paying a man and woman five hundred and forty dollars a year, having a horse and carriage, and feeding five persons instead of three, a total of less than six hundred dollars a year. Lest this should be unbelievable, I put it in another form—the total expenses of the farm, including labour, were less than twelve hundred dollars, the income was six hundred dollars, and the net loss, or the cost to us of a year’s living, was less than six hundred. And these figures, it should be explained, included not merely board, but also household supplies and repairs of all sorts, items which would appear in other places in the community’s accounts. I will probably be laughed at, but I believe that, granting the land, horses and machinery, buildings, equipment and capital, the members of such a colony as I describe could be provided with perfect service and an abundance of food of the best quality at a total cost of one hundred dollars a year per person.
So much for the coöperative preparation of food. And now for the caring for children. There should be two separate establishments, one for infants, who like to sleep, and one for children, who like to run and shout. Both should be scientifically constructed and ventilated and kept as clean as an up-to-date hospital; the food should be prepared under the general direction of a physician. No building for children should be over two stories high, and the upper windows should be beyond the reach of children; no matches or exposed fire should be permitted, and there should be a night watchman, fire extinguishers, and an automatic sprinkling apparatus. These establishments should be under the supervision of a board of women directors; and the actual work of caring for the children, washing, dressing and feeding them, playing with them and teaching them, should be done by trained nurses and kindergarten teachers who live in the colony as the friends and social equals, of its members. In other words, it is my idea that the caring for children should be recognised as a profession, and that servants should have nothing to do with it; it is my idea that it should be done in a place built for the purpose, with floors for babies to crawl where there is no dirt for them to eat, with playgrounds for children where there are no stoves and no boiling water, no staircases and wells, no cats and dogs, no workbaskets, lamps, pianos, sewing machines, jam closets, inkstands, and authors’ writing tables. Instead, there should be sleeping rooms and bedrooms, and sun parlours for nursing mothers; a separate building for the sick; kindergarten rooms and indoor playgrounds for bad weather, and a big all-outdoors romping ground, with sunny places and shady places, swings, rocking horses, sand piles, and all other accessories of a children’s heaven. Of course, any mother should come and play with or care for her own children just as much as she pleased, or take them home, as she chose; though I think that no one would care to assist this plan who did not believe that children should be cared for in accordance with the principles of science, and preserved from the corrupting influence of grandmothers and aunts. Of course, any mother who believed that her work in the world was caring for children, and who wished to care for her own and others, according to the methods of the commonwealth, would be free to do so, and to earn her living by doing it.
I have already explained that I should not regard this as an experiment in Socialism; but I do think that those who undertook it would have to be in sympathy with the spirit of Socialism, which is the spirit of brotherhood and democracy. Whenever I have mentioned this plan to friends they have always said: “The great difficulty would be to get together a community of congenial people.” It does not seem to me that this would be a difficulty at all. Every member of the community would have his own home, to which he would invite his personal friends as he chose; and the other members of the community he would meet in the same way that he meets acquaintances in business and politics, in theatres, restaurants, and clubs. I myself am the most unsociable of human beings when I am busy, and have no idea of giving up my hermit’s tastes. In a colony of a hundred families there ought to be persons of every kind of inclination, and it would not be in the least necessary for anyone to associate with those who were not congenial.
Of course there are people in the world whom we should not want near us at all; but such people, I think, would not care to join our colony. Vulgar and snobbish people get along very well in the world as it is, and do not find it a task to give orders to servants. Those who would be interested in such a plan would be men and women who wished to practise “plain living and high thinking”; and they would naturally wish to get as far as possible from every suggestion of ostentation and conventionality. They would establish the shirt-waist and the short skirt as en règle, and would, I trust, allow me in without a dress suit. They would be all hard-working people themselves, and they would not look down upon honest labour. This spirit, if wisely and earnestly cultivated, would solve the “servant problem” for the colony, and solve the health problem for its members as well. I know business and professional men who, when they need exercise, have to go down into the basement and lift weights and pull at rubber straps; and they envy me my farm, where I can hoe the garden, or pitch hay, or pick fruit, and not merely benefit my body, but also put money in my purse. In this community every member would be credited for the time he worked; and it ought to become the custom for the men to help with the harvests, and the women with the preserving of fruit, and the children with the berry picking and the weeding of the gardens. I have no doubt that there are thousands of young men and women in New York City, students of art and music and the professions, who would be glad of a chance to earn their way in a community where class feeling did not make labour degrading. I appreciate the difficulties in the way of such a project; the chances at present are against a coal-heaver’s being a socially possible person, and I am not insisting that the day labourers should share in the privileges of the community. But I do think that this should certainly be the case with those whom we select to care for and teach our children, and also, if possible, with those whom we permit to prepare and serve our food; if I am not willing to shake a man’s hand or sit next to him in a reading-room, I do not see why I should be willing to eat what he has cooked. I personally know a young man who is studying art, and who earns his living by washing dishes in a downtown restaurant, because it takes only two or three hours a day of his time. In Memorial Hall at Harvard University, in the sanitarium at Battle Creek, and in many other places I might name, those who wait upon the tables are college students; and anyone who knows the difference which there is in the atmosphere of such a dining hall knows what I should wish to attain.
The above article brought me replies from four or five hundred persons; and committees were named, which met all through the summer to work out the details of the plan. In October of the same year the purchase of Helicon Hall was made, and the “Colony” began its career. Six months after the publication of my first article, I contributed to The Independent an account of how the experiment was succeeding; I quote from it the following paragraphs:
We made many mistakes; I shall tell about some of them in due course, for the benefit of future pioneers. But there is one thing to be said here at the start: we made no mistake in believing in democratic institutions. It was a point about which the critics of our plan were all agreed, that it could not possibly work, because people could never decide what they wanted. That dreadful bugaboo called “human nature” would wreck us in the end. I, for my part, believed that people in America were used to the methods of majority government, and I believed that if we should apply those same methods in a coöperative home, a group of intelligent and sincere people could manage to solve all their problems. From the beginning our policy was publicity and democracy; and from the beginning it brought us through. At the committee meetings everyone had his say. And little by little you would see a majority opinion taking shape on the question at issue, until, finally, when all had been heard, the matter was put to a vote. There was no case where the minority did not give way with all courtesy. And now that the colony really exists we sit round the fireside and talk out our questions, and as a rule we do not even have to take a vote—an informal discussion is enough to make clear to everyone what is fair and right.
I am a believer in the materialistic conception of history; I am accustomed to interpret the characters of men from this position—to say that competition has made them selfish and deceitful, and that coöperation will make them beautiful and sincere. I think that I can see it working out in this colony. We have founded it upon justice and truth; socially we stand upon terms of equality, and economically we pay for exactly what we get. These are the principles we have built upon, and all take them for granted, and no other idea ever enters their thought.