As a nation, we are forever striving to form a more perfect union. The concept is even enshrined in our founding documents. America is, we recognize, isn’t yet perfect, but the American experience is that of constant experimentation and discovery in search of that which will make it more perfect.
Sometimes, though, in that search, we fall victim to the temptation of utopia—the idea that absolute societal perfection is possible—and we hear the siren song of socialism. Just as our quest for a more perfect union started with America’s founding, so too did its flirtation with the dangerous belief that government can and should make things more equal, and thus, perfect.
This is the forgotten history of America’s first Socialist experiment.
Robert Owen was an idealist; a wealthy British industrialist who thought that he could build what he called “a new moral world.”
“There is but one mode by which man can possess in perpetuity all the happiness which his nature is capable of enjoying,” he wrote, “[and] that is by the union and co-operation of all for the benefit of each.”
On April 27th, 1825, he purchased the tiny village of New Harmony, Indiana from a religious community.
He firmly believed that the success of his new utopia would prove his theory that “society may be formed so as to exist without crime, without poverty, with health greatly improved, with little, if any misery, and with intelligence and happiness increased a hundredfold; and no obstacle whatsoever intervenes at this moment except ignorance to prevent such a state of society from becoming universal.”
In other words, New Harmony would be a perfect society. He would build it that way, and he convinced Congress to help make it happen. He so intrigued Washington, D.C. that 800 of the city’s leading artists and thinkers joined him to build a community in which each person would contribute his unique talents and share equally in the bounty that they would surely produce.
Only they didn’t. Residents had no motivation to work since they would be paid the same as those who didn’t, and the government was so ineffectual that it couldn’t even run the town’s general store.
“[E]ven salads were deposited in the store to be handed out,” one New Harmony resident wrote, “making 10,000 unnecessary steps [and] causing them to come to the tables in a wilted, deadened state.”
Owen was getting desperate. His utopia was collapsing, but on July 4th, 1826—the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—he doubled down on his vision with a “Declaration of Mental Independence.”
“I now declare to you and to the world that man up to this hour has been in all parts of the earth a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race,” he said. “I refer to private property, absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage founded upon individual property.”
Within a year, though, Owen’s noble vision failed miserably. No one was growing food or building houses because they had no incentive to work hard enough to feed or house those who wouldn’t work, so homelessness and famine ran rampant.
In March, 1827, in a desperate bid to save the town, Owen allowed residents to own private property, but it was already too late. His dream was dead, and the last of his followers left New Harmony in 1829.
Owen spent the rest of his life paying off the massive debts that his failed experiment had run up, but until the day he died he refused to admit that his vision was a failure.
However, his son, future Congressman Robert Dale Owen, harbored no such delusions.
“All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle must work their own downfall,” he wrote. “For by this unjust plan they must of necessity eliminate the valuable members and retain only the improvident, unskilled and vicious.”
Decades before Engels and Marx changed the world with their views on socialism and a century before violent revolutions put socialism in power across the globe, America had already experimented with it—and realized very quickly that it was doomed to failure.