Editing New Harmony, Indiana (section)

===Owen community (1825–1827)===

[[File:New harmony vision.jpg|thumb|300px|New Harmony as envisioned by Owen<ref>"New Harmony as envisioned by Owen" was originally captioned by [[Stedman Whitwell]], the architect who drew the figure, as "Design for a Community of 2000 Person founded upon a principle Commended by Plato, Lord Bacon and Sir Thomas More" in ''Description of an Architectural Model From a Design by Stedman Whitwell, Exq. For a Community Upon a Principle of United Interests, as Advocated by Robert Owen, Esq.'' (London: Hurst Chance and Co., 1830). Whitwell (1784–1840) lived in New Harmony during 1825. John W. Reps,[http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/whitwell.htm "Whitwell, Description of a Model City"], Cornell University. Retrieved June 20, 2012. In [[Edward Royle]]'s ''Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium,'' (Manchester University Press, 1998), Whitwell's figure is presented in a chapter on Harmony, the name of Owen's community in Hampshire, England, dating from 1841, although the figure was published in 1830 and almost certainly existed as early as 1825.</ref>]]
[[Robert Owen]] was a social reformer and wealthy industrialist who made his fortune from textile mills in [[New Lanark]], [[Scotland]]. Owen, his twenty-two-year-old son, William, and his Scottish friend Donald McDonald <ref>{{cite book|last1=Pitzer|first1=Donald|title=New Harmony Then and Now|date=2012|publisher=Quarry Books|isbn=978-0-253-35645-1|page=50}}</ref> sailed to the United States in 1824 to purchase a site to implement Owen's vision for "a New Moral World" of happiness, enlightenment, and prosperity through education, science, technology, and communal living. Owen believed his utopian community would create a "superior social, intellectual and physical environment" based on his ideals of social reform.<ref name=Pitzer>Donald E. Pitzer, "The Original Boatload of Knowledge Down the Ohio River." Reprint. ''Ohio Journal of Science'' 89, no. 5 (December 1989):128&ndash;142.</ref> Owen was motivated to buy the town in order to prove his theories were viable and to correct the troubles that were affecting his mill-town community [[New Lanark]].<ref>{{cite book|last1=Wilson|first1=William|title=The Angel and the Serpent|date=1964|publisher=Vail-Ballou Press, Inc.|location=Binghamton, N.Y.|pages=102–103}}</ref> The ready-built town of Harmony, Indiana, fitted Owen's needs. In January 1825 he signed the agreement to purchase the town, renamed it New Harmony, and invited "any and all" to join him there.<ref>William E. Wilson, ''The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony'' (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967, 2nd ed.), p. 105, 110, 116.</ref> While many of the town's new arrivals had a sincere interest in making it a success, the experiment also attracted "crackpots, free-loaders, and adventurers whose presence in the town made success unlikely."<ref>Wilson, p. 116.</ref> William Owen, who remained in New Harmony while his father returned east to recruit new residents, also expressed concern in his diary entry, dated March{{nbsp}}24, 1825: "I doubt whether those who have been comfortable and content in their old mode of life, will find an increase of enjoyment when they come here. How long it will require to accustom themselves to their new mode of living, I am unable to determine."<ref>Joel Hiatt, ed., "Diary of William Owen: From November 10, 1824, to April 20, 1825" ''[[Indiana Historical Society]] Publications'' 4, no. 1 (1906): 130.</ref>

When Robert Owen returned to New Harmony in April 1825 he found seven to eight hundred residents and a "chaotic" situation, much in need of leadership.<ref>Carmony and Elliott, p. 168.</ref> By May 1825 the community had adopted the "Constitution of the Preliminary Society," which loosely outlined its expectations and government. Under the preliminary constitution, members would provide their own household goods and invest their capital at interest in an enterprise that would promote independence and social equality. Members would render services to the community in exchange for credit at the town's store, but those who did not want to work could purchase credit at the store with cash payments made in advance.<ref>Wilson, p. 117&ndash;118.</ref> In addition, the town would be governed by a committee of four members chosen by Owen and the community would elect three additional members.<ref>Wilson, p. 119.</ref> In June, Robert Owen left William in New Harmony while he traveled east to continue promoting his model community and returned to Scotland, where he sold his interests in the New Lanark textile mills and arranged financial support for his wife and two daughters, who chose to remain in Scotland.<ref>Wilson, p. 119&ndash;122.</ref> Owen's four sons, Robert Dale, William, David Dale, and Richard, and a daughter, Jane Dale, later settled in New Harmony.<ref>Wilson, p. 122.</ref><ref>Several of Robert Owen's children were given the middle name Dale in honor of Owen's father-in-law, David Dale.</ref>

While Owen was away recruiting new residents for New Harmony, a number of factors that led to an early breakup of the [[Socialism|socialist community]] had already begun. Members grumbled about inequity in credits between workers and non-workers.<ref>Wilson, p. 125.</ref> In addition, the town soon became overcrowded, lacked sufficient housing, and was unable to produce enough to become self-sufficient, although they still had "high hopes for the future."<ref>Wilson, p. 135.</ref> Owen spent only a few months at New Harmony, where a shortage of skilled craftsmen and laborers along with inadequate and inexperienced supervision and management contributed to its eventual failure.<ref>Carmony and Elliott, p. 170.</ref>

Despite the community's shortcomings, Owen was a passionate promoter of his vision for New Harmony. While visiting Philadelphia, Owen met [[Marie Louise Duclos Fretageot]], a [[Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi|Pestalozzian]] educator, and persuaded her to join him in Indiana. Fretageot encouraged [[William Maclure]], a scientist and fellow educator, to become a part of the venture. (Maclure became Owen's financial partner.) On January 26, 1826, Fretegeot, Maclure, and a number of their colleagues, including [[Thomas Say]], [[Josef Neef]], [[Charles-Alexandre Lesueur]], and others aboard the keelboat ''Philanthropist'' (also called the "Boatload of Knowledge"), arrived in New Harmony to help Owen establish his new experiment in socialism.<ref>Wilson, p. 118.</ref>

On February 5, 1826, the town adopted a new constitution, "The New Harmony Community of Equality", whose objective was to achieve happiness based on principles of equal rights and equality of duties. Cooperation, common property, economic benefit, freedom of speech and action, kindness and courtesy, order, preservation of health, acquisition of knowledge, and obedience to the country's laws were included as part of the constitution.<ref>Wilson, p. 149.</ref> The constitution laid out the life of a citizen in New Harmony based on age. Children from the age of one to five  were to be cared for and encouraged to exercise; children aged six to nine were to be lightly employed and given education via observation directed by skilled teachers. Youth from the ages of ten to twelve were to help in the houses and with the gardening. Teenagers from the age of twelve to fifteen were to receive technical training, and from fifteen to twenty their education was to be continued. Young adults from the ages of twenty to thirty were to act as a superintendent in the production and education departments. Adults from the ages of thirty to forty were to govern the homes, and residents aged forty to sixty were to be encouraged to assist with the community's external relations or to travel abroad if they so desired.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Lockwood|first1=George|title=The New Harmony Movement|url=https://archive.org/details/newharmonymoveme00lock_0|date=1905|publisher=D. Appleton and Company|location=New York|pages=[https://archive.org/details/newharmonymoveme00lock_0/page/66 66]–67}}</ref>

Although the constitution contained worthy ideals, it did not clearly address how the community would function and was never fully established.<ref>Carmony and Elliott, p. 173.</ref> [[Individualist anarchist]] [[Josiah Warren]], who was one of the original participants in the New Harmony Society, asserted that the community was doomed to failure due to a lack of individual sovereignty and private property. He commented: "It seemed that the difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity. Two years were worn out in this way; at the end of which, I believe that not more than three persons had the least hope of success. Most of the experimenters left in despair of all reforms, and conservatism felt itself confirmed. We had tried every conceivable form of organization and government. We had a world in miniature. --we had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. ...It appeared that it was nature's own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us ...our 'united interests' were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation... and it was evident that just in proportion to the contact of persons or interests, so are concessions and compromises indispensable." (''Periodical Letter II'' 1856).

Part of New Harmony's failings stemmed from three activities that Owen brought from Scotland to America. First, Owen actively attacked established religion, despite United States' constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and the separations of church and state. Second, Owen remained stubbornly attached to the principles of the rationalist [[Age of Enlightenment]], which drove away many of the [[Jeffersonian democracy|Jeffersonian]] farmers Owen tried to attract. Thirdly, Owen consistently appealed to the upper class for donations, but found that the strategy was not as effective as it had been in Europe.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Pitzer|first1=Donald|title=New Harmony Then and Now|date=2012|publisher=Quarry Books|isbn=978-0-253-35645-1|pages=51–53}}</ref>

Robert Dale Owen wrote that the members of the failed socialist experiment at New Harmony were "a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest [[latitudinarian]]s, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in,"<ref name="clayton">Joseph Clayton, [https://books.google.com/books?id=nuspAAAAYAAJ&dq=%22a+heterogeneous+collection+of+radicals%22&pg=PA43 ''Robert Owen: Pioneer of Social Reforms''] (London: A.C. Fifield, 1908)</ref> and that "a plan which remunerates all alike, will, in the present condition of society, ultimately eliminate from a co-operative association the skilled, efficient and industrious members, leaving an ineffective and sluggish residue, in whose hands the experiment will fail, both socially and pecuniarily."<ref>{{cite book |last=Dale |first=Robert Owen |date=1874 |title= Threading my way: Twenty-seven years of autobiography |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015026473986;view=1up;seq=276 |publisher=[[Trübner & Co.]] |page=258}}</ref> However, he still thought that "co-operation ''is'' a chief agency destined to quiet the clamorous conflicts between capital and labour; but then it must be co-operation gradually introduced, prudently managed, as now in England."<ref>{{cite book |last=Dale |first=Robert Owen |date=1874 |title= Threading my way: Twenty-seven years of autobiography |url=https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015026473986;view=1up;seq=259|publisher=[[Trübner & Co.]] |page=241}}</ref>  In 1826 splinter groups dissatisfied with the efforts of the larger community broke away from the main group and prompted a reorganization.<ref>Carmony and Elliott, p. 174&ndash;176.</ref>

In New Harmony work was divided into six departments, each with its own superintendent. These departments included agriculture, manufacturing, domestic economy, general economy, commerce, and literature, science and education. A governing council included the six superintendents and an elected secretary.<ref>Wilson, p. 150.</ref> Despite the new organization and constitution, members continued to leave town.<ref>Wilson, p. 153&ndash;54.</ref> By March 1827, after several other attempts to reorganize, the utopian experiment had failed.

The larger community, which lasted until 1827, was divided into smaller communities that led further disputes. Individualism replaced socialism in 1828 and New Harmony was dissolved in 1829 due to constant quarrels. The town's parcels of land and property were returned to private use.<ref name="clayton" /> Owen spent $200,000 of his own funds to purchase New Harmony property and pay off the community's debts. His sons, Robert Dale and William, gave up their shares of the New Lanark mills in exchange for shares in New Harmony. Later, Owen "conveyed the entire New Harmony property to his sons in return for an annuity of $1,500 for the remainder of his life." Owen left New Harmony in June 1827 and focused his interests in the United Kingdom. He died in 1858.<ref>Wilson, p. 162&ndash;64.</ref>