Trying Home: The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound by Justin Wadland (review)

Justin Wadland’s Trying Home: The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound investigates the establishment, struggle for acceptance, and premature dissolution of a short-lived experimental community in the Pacific Northwest. Home’s history has previously been considered in Charles LeWarne’s Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885–1915, and Paul Avrich collected several firsthand accounts from the last surviving former members in Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (which, somewhat surprisingly, Wadland does not cite). Trying Home, though, is the first book-length treatment of the colony.

Founded in 1896 with the ideal of providing a workable, freer alternative to the brutal capitalism of the age, Home disintegrated only 25 years later, barely a generation. Wadland sets out to chronicle everyday life in the community, the forces that drew the people together and those that later tore them apart, and to ask if such a bold attempt at an ideal society is inevitably doomed or whether lessons can be learned from its demise.

Written in an introspective, though conversational, tone, Trying Home succeeds in conveying a sense of the fragile and contingent nature of such utopian communities, attempting to hold in equilibrium the various ideals and visions of idealists for whom mainstream society is too cloying or restrictive. Home itself had risen, phoenixlike, from the ashes of an earlier experimental socialist community called Glennis, inspired by Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward: 2000–1887, which had briefly prospered before sinking under the weight of internal dissension. Unfortunately, like Glennis, Home soon found that the gap between lofty aspiration and a workable society was a wide one. Wadland quotes a visiting journalist’s summary of the members’ belief that “all restraint . . . must be injurious. if there were no laws, we should not be able to break them. Thus crime would die of inanition and the perfect state ensue” (12). Its inhabitants aspired to creating a free-thinking society of harmony and liberty, freed from the shackles of convention and conformity. It is somewhat bathetic, then, to read that one of the issues that caused greatest friction and distrust among residents is that of nude bathing in the sea, the cause of much controversy, recrimination, and eventually a bitter court case. By the time legal papers were served in 1918 against the last few members refusing to abandon mutual ownership of property, the experiment had long since collapsed in all but name. Indeed, as early as 1909, widespread theft and burglary in the community had caused some residents to demand the appointment of a local deputy sheriff, signaling as surely as anything could the end of the dream of a utopian society where crime would die of “inanition” (138).

As might be expected, the idealism required in any attempt to create an alternative community is bound to attract bold, unconventional, and often restless individuals, and Wadland does a workmanlike job of fleshing out the pasts and motivations that drew anarchists, freethinkers, and the simply wandering or curious. He also does a reasonable, if limited, job of placing the community within the fractious anarchist and revolutionary politics of the time. Where the work falls down badly, though, is in the format and lack of scholarly rigor. Wadland intersperses the history of Home with personal observances and commentary that at first lend color and immediacy to the investigation but soon become overindulgent. By the sixth chapter, when we are given a two-page account of helping to moor the boat of a local fisherman, it is hard to avoid the feeling that these asides are being used to pad out what would otherwise be an even slimmer volume than the 175 pages (including bibliography and index) it already is.

Even more galling is the unsignaled breaking of basic biographical conventions in the chapter on Donald Vose, a disgruntled former resident of Home (his...