Between 1776 and 1976: The World of Children in an American Commune of the 1890s

In November 1897, "Uncle Herbert," editor of the Children's Column in the newspaper of a commune in Tennessee, observed: "These colonists have forsaken an artificial civilization and have gone back, or rather forwards, to a simpler and more natural life. It is a curious mingling of 1776 and 1976, of backwoods and millenium." Now, as we look back from "millenium," most of the children of these colonists, who once loved the experiment in natural living, have seen it fail, lost faith in it, and are dead.

Many of the political and social problems, fads and innovations that made headlines in the 1970s were familiar to at least one group of children of the 1890s. In the commune of some 500 people of the Ruskin, Tennessee Cooperative Association, thirty miles south of Nashville, children joyously experienced open education, covertly listened to the discussions of their parents about sex outside marriage or read about free love in the communal library, demonstrated against war, espoused health foods and mysticism, wrote letters to the editor about the pollution of air and water by factories, and shared a life of equality with other human beings without regard to sex or race. Children lived through these experiences, saw the commune fail, and seemingly grew up and forgot. But now, three generations later, like slow-germinating seeds, these interests are sprouting up everywhere.

Idealists in the commune, which was composed mainly of factory laborers from New England and miners and farmers from the West who were thrown out of work by the Depression of 1893, tried hard from 1893 to 1901 to arrange an unusual system of education for children. But quarrels within the commune, mainly over free love, separated the members. About half—the anti-free-love contingent—left in September 1899 to establish another Ruskin near Waycross, Georgia, at the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp. Typhoid fever and starvation—colonists were reduced to eating stray alligators and cornmeal shaped and fried to look like pork chops—concluded the experiment toward the end of 1901. Those tolerant of free love scattered to other places, including the art colony at Fairhope, Alabama.

Information about life in the commune has to be ferreted out of the columns of The Coming Nation, the weekly newspaper of the commune, the files of which extend from 1893 through 1901 and are preserved in the Draper Collection of the State Historical Library in Madison, Wisconsin. The writings of Ruskin, Marx, and other socialists were quoted in the paper and sold by the commune, which was certainly one of the first to be influenced by Marx. Considerable material can be found in Special Collections in the University of Tennessee Library. Some is in my possession, since my father-in-law was one of the printers of The Coming Nation and my late husband, Jerome Butler, was born in the commune.

Perhaps the most radical innovation in the commune was a form of open education. Accounts in The Coming Nation and interviews with aged persons who were children in the colony make it clear that children were given wide freedom to pursue individual interests. No special emphasis was put on having to learn specific academic skills such as reading. Rather, the hope of the Ruskinites was that their children would learn some practical work-skill and also some art, such as painting or music—the latter because they espoused Ruskin's theory that creativity would flourish better in a free, secure environment. If a child was so inclined, Ruskinites wanted him to have every opportunity for a higher education. After a free education, many Ruskinites believed that a normal child of ten should be able to lead a happy, balanced life with the skills he had attained up to that point.

Various work and study areas were arranged on colony grounds: woodworking area, communal garden, studio for sculpturing and painting, printing and newspaper work area, tailor shop, kitchen, library, music room, as well as an area for study of the traditional reading, writing, and 'rithmatic. And there were facilities for simple scientific...