The Unbounded Frame: Freedom and Community in Nineteenth Century America (review)

168CIVIL war history the preface, Schroeder states that the antiwar movement during the Mexican War is "representative" of later examples. What seems most representative of "Mr. Polk's War," however, was the President's ability to squelch dissent by fusing partisan with national objectives. The Mexican War helped to establish precedent for creating and enforcing consensus, and wartime Presidents seem to have been diligent students of this episode in American history. Ronald L. Hatzenbuehler Idaho State University The Unbounded Frame: Freedom and Community in Nineteenth Century America. By Michael FeIIman. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press Inc., 1973. Pp. xx, 203. $10.00.) In this brief volume of loosely connected essays, Michael FeIIman of Simon Fraser University explores responses to Utopia of ten reformers from Albert Brisbane to William Dean Howells. Although most essays are well done, the book does not stand as a unified whole and Fellman's choice of subjects sometimes seems a bit arbitrary. Of the ten writers only the Fourierist Albert Brisbane, the Christian perfectionist John Humphrey Noyes, and possibly the anarchist enemy of money Josiah Warren, gave themselves seriously to the task of creating Utopian communities . Three persons, Isaac T. Hecker, Margaret Fuller, and G. W. Curtis, had ties with the celebrated Brook Farm Association (later Phalanx) but never accepted communal ideology. Hecker lingered a few months before fleeing to Catholicism and the Paulist Brothers; Margaret Fuller enjoyed her visits without ever proposing membership; and Curtis found the communal spirit hostile to his ultra-individualism from the beginning of his sojourn at West Roxbury. Curtis, who never really belonged to Utopia, is introduced with the chapter title "From Utopia to Politics" and Horace Mann, who can best be described as an advocate of educational reform to sustain conservative values and institutions, enters the scene with doubtful relevance under the chapter title "A Traditionalist Analogue." The other three Utopians, Edward Bellamy, Ignatius Donnelly, and Howells belong to different traditions and to the era just before "progressivism took the place of Utopianism." Fellman's Bellamy is recognizable , his Howells hardly develops in a scant six page essay, and his presentation of Donnelly's lurid fantasies makes the Populist warrior even more absurd than in earlier accounts by other scholars. These three writers did not belong to the old context of Utopian thought; they merely use the idea of Utopia as a novelistic device to criticize industrial America and to argue for new social policies. The old Utopians had emerged in Jacksonian America during troubled but simpler times. The Revolution created the possibility for "more equalitarian political methods and forms," Americans felt released from European BOOK REVIEWS169 concerns after 1815, and transportation and other economic developments disrupted local life. Most importantly, traditional institutions such as the churches seemed to be decaying as old elites lost power and "the centrality of the family" declined. To Jacksonian reformers the past seemed "dissolved" and men felt a "freedom from traditional limitation " which enabled them to move through "the unbounded frame" to remake completely man's social world. One important response was the plethora of communities from New Harmony to Brook Farm, the North American Phalanx and beyond, all founded on the belief that the entire nation could be converted by one or several communal demonstrations of social science truths. So Professor FeIIman reasons in a book that has several faults and a substantially larger number of virtues. Although some of his general explanations are familiar and part of his information easily available elsewhere, he has done a very creditable research job and has developed many valuable insights. While his bibliography is far from exhaustive , it is concise, well presented, and quite useful. On the whole, FeIIman has ample reason to be proud of a significant contribution to scholarship and an excellent introduction to American Utopianism for both graduate and undergraduate students. Each essay is carefully organized and written with both intellectual clarity and literary grace, and every scholar interested in Utopian thought, early socialism, or simply the middle period, can read this volume with profit. The Greenwood editors are to be commended for a good job of production and for the fine series (Contributions in American History) in which this volume appears. Charles...