The Wisconsin Phalanx: A Forgotten Success Story

Canadian Review of American Studies/ Revuecanadienned'etudesamericaines Volume 28, Number 2, 1998, pp. 119-143 The Wisconsin Phalanx: A Forgotten Success Story Andrew E. Hunt 119 'Why is there no socialism in the United States?' asked the influential German economic historian Werner Sombart in 1906 ([1906] 1976). Since Sombart posed the question, historians of every ideological stripe have attempted to furnish an answer. Some scholars have focussed on politics, seeking to explain why ·more radical third parties have consistently floundered. Others have turned to labour history, investigating the failure of unions to promote socialist ideology in America. A third, smaller contingent has studied the hundreds of nineteenth-century utopian socialist experiments in the United States in an attempt to understand the dynamics of life and work in alternative economic orders. Why these communes eventually disappeared became a central theme in most works. For years, historians tended to dismiss such endeavours as anomalies or "interesting failures," but the upheavals and resurgence of communal experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s prompted academics to reassess the communitarian movement. The "utopian" scholars-whose ranks include Arthur Bestor (1950), Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1967), Donald E. Pitzer (1997), Edward K. Spann (1989), and Carl Guarneri (1991; 1997)-have devoted much attention to Owenite (named for British socialist Robert Owen) and Fourierist (named for French socialist Charles Fourier) experiments in an effort to explore the breadth and distinctive features of 120 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d etudes amertcames American antebellum socialist enterprises. While arnvmg at differentthough sometimes overlapping-conclusions, these historians generally agree that communitarianism represented a coherent mass movement, amid awidespread current of reform in the 1830s and 1840s, that sought to establish a viable alternative to northern wage labour and southern slavery. In the process, utopian socialism emerged as an indigenous variant of Republican ideology whose purpose was to fashion a humane collective vision within an increasingly competitive American society. Recently, some historians have proposed that the failure of antebellum socialist thinkers and their experimental communities lay not in quixotic devotion to utopian ideals, but in their inability to distance themselves sufficiently from northern wage labour. In his brilliant The Utopian Alternative : Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (1991), Carl Guarneri suggests that many apostles of the ideas of French socialist Charles Fourier appealed to prospective adherents by promising a more socially cohesive version of northern wage labour. Guarneri observed that by the middle of the nineteenth century, American Fourierists embraced certain "key capitalist features" that combined harmoniously with "the prevailing competitive system" (1991, 345). Far from being too radical, a number of Fourierist communities , or "phalanxes" as they were called, bore enough striking similarities to capitalism that they typically melted quietly into their surroundings. This article is a case study of the Wisconsin Phalanx, also known as Ceresco (named for Ceres, the Greek goddess of grain), a utopian experiment that lasted from 1844 to 1850. In addition to being the second longest lasting Fourierist community (behind the North American Phalanx, which had a twelve-year duration), it was one of the most financially successful, transforming its original US$1,000 of assets to US$ 33,000 during its six years of existence. Although Ceresco achieved wealth and eminence in its day, it remains a forgotten "utopia." It failed to attract the literati of the Brook Farm, and it did not boast the free love of John Humphrey Noyes' Oneida Community . However, the cautious, entrepreneurial residents of Ceresco embodied all of the Republican virtues of their era, even as they embraced Fourierism. Their experiment, doomed to failure by the late 1840s, was not the fatality of an excessively lofty vision, but of profit-minded sensibilities. Andrew E. Hunt / 121 Like the countercultural communes of the Vietnam War era, the socialist colonies of pre-Civil War America were born during a time of turbulence and reform. And like their 1960s descendants, antebellum socialist experiments appeared as both an outgrowth and a critique of American society. The increased mechanization of the industrial sector, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of fewer financiers and merchants, the Panic of 1837, and the instability of incipient labour unions in northeastern urban centres all contributed to...