The Phalanstery is Man's True Home
A. J. Macdonald. Sketch of the Clermont Phalanx. 1844-47. Writings on American Utopian Communities. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
My four times great-grandfather Abner Hixon Longley, the son of Thomas Longley, was born in Mason County, Kentucky, in 1796 and went on to live a rather remarkable life. He worked as a cabinetmaker; attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, during the 1820s; founded the town of Lebanon, Indiana, in 1832; served in the Indiana state legislature during the 1830s; was ordained a Universalist minister in 1845; and supported the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. He was a man of strong principles but also an idealist, as can be seen in his engagement with utopian socialism.
A biographical sketch of Abner’s life, published in the weekly newspaper The Universalist in September 1886, describes his involvement with utopianism while living in Cincinnati, Ohio, during the 1840s:
In 1844, Mr. Longley's mind was directed to an examination of the doctrines of Charles Fourier, the French socialist, who wrote and published a very elaborate scheme for benefiting the human race by a more equitable distribution of the rewards of labor and money. A society was formed, consisting of intelligent and well-meaning men, to solve the problem of associated labor and consolidated or a unitary household.
The Clermont (or Cincinnati) Phalanx, as this society was known, was one of several Fourierist organizations founded in the Midwest during this time period (Guarneri 1997). Based on the work of French intellectual Charles Fourier, who argued that industrial capitalism was the source of widespread corruption and unhappiness, these organizations sought to build ideal communities, known as phalanxes, in which Fourier’s theories could be practiced. Residents would own the land in common, supply their particular skills to the needs of the community, and be rewarded in proportion to the extent of their contribution. The center of the community would be the phalanstery, a common residence with quarters for each resident family (Guarneri 1991).[1]
Victor Considerant. 1836. Idée d'un phalanstère. La Phalange, journal de la science sociale découverte et constituée par Charles Fourier.
The members of the Clermont Phalanx acquired around 900 acres of land in Clermont County, Ohio, 30 miles southeast of Cincinnati on the Ohio River, and in May 1844, launched their new endeavor with a festive event, during which, as observer A.J. Macdonald described, the whole group “marched on shore in procession, with a band of music in front, leading the way up a road cut in the high clay bank; and then formed a mass meeting, at which we had praying, music and speech-making” (Noyes 1880).[2]
Visiting again in July 1844, Macdonald described the Clermont Phalanx’s version of a phalanstery:
A temporary house had been erected to accommodate the families then on the domain, amounting as I was informed, to about one hundred and twenty persons. This building was made exactly in the manner of· the cabin of a Western steamboat; i. e., there was one long narrow room the length of the house—and little rooms—like state-rooms arranged on either side. Each little room had one little window, like a port-hole; and was intended to accommodate a man and his wife, or two single men temporarily (Noyes 1880).
I don’t know what Abner Longley thought of living in such accommodations. In 1844, he and his second wife had three small children, which must have made for crowded quarters. And even at this early stage, Macdonald had some doubts about the future of the phalanx, saying, “It was at once apparent that the persons living there were in circumstances inferior to what they had been used to; and were enduring it well, while the enthusiastic spirit held out. But it seldom lasts long” (Noyes 1880).
In fact, the Clermont Phalanx, like many other utopian communities, rather quickly ran into difficulties. Historians suggest that the failures of so many 19th century utopian communities were caused by a number of factors, including a tendency to rush headlong into launching communities without sufficient forethought and planning; the purchase of large and unsuitable properties leading to excessive debt; disputes over property ownership, social mores, and religious beliefs; and naivety about the hardships of frontier life. All these factors well describe the experiences of the Clermont Phalanx, which struggled with debt and internal conflict throughout its short existence and ended in November 1846 after only two and a half years (Noyes 1880; Garneri 1997; Flatt & Hoehnle 2019).
Abner Longley and his family returned to Cincinnati, most likely well before the final dissolution of the Clermont Phalanx, as the 1846 Cincinnati directory shows him living in the city. The failure of this utopian experiment doesn’t seem to have quenched his family’s idealism, however. Several of his sons were also involved with utopian socialism, including living in communal homes at various times in their lives and publishing a Fourierist newspaper titled The Phalansterian Record. Abner’s son Alcander Longley, in fact, so took to heart his father’s utopian values that he dedicated his life to the cause, a story I will save for another post.
Following the collapse of the Clermont Phalanx, a portion of its property was acquired to build a Spiritualist community called Excelsior, which disbanded after flooding in December 1847 killed 17 of its members. Another part of the property was renamed as the village of Utopia and efforts were made to continue communal living practices, albeit in a less structured way than demanded by Fourierism (Flatt & Hoehnle 2019). While these efforts lasted only a few years, there is still a portion of Clermont County, Ohio, known as Utopia.
Arthur Rothstein. 1940. Melting snow, Utopia, Ohio. Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.
[1] Fourier’s specifications for the development of phalanxes were remarkably detailed—each of the phalanxes were to be made up of 1,620 individuals and bult on 6,000 acres of land—as were his visions of the many changes a perfected world could expect to see. Among many other predictions, he concluded that people would eventually live to the age of (exactly) 144 years and grow “long and infinitely useful” tails (Guarneri 1981).
[2] A.J. Macdonald spent a decade or more visiting utopian communities in the United States, intending to use his experiences as the basis for a book. After he died of cholera in 1854, his notes were used by John Humphrey Noyes as the basis for his 1880 book History of American Socialisms, Macdonald’s original notes still exist and have been digitized by Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Works Cited
Flatt, Cori L., and Peter A. Hoehnle. 2019. “Utopia, Ohio, 1844–1847: Seedbed for Three Experiments in Communal Living.” American Communal Societies Quarterly 13(1): 3-31.
Guarneri, Carl J. 1991. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Guarneri, Carl J. 1997. “Brook Farm and the Fourierist Phalanxes: Immediatism, Gradualism, and American Utopian Socialism.” America’s Communal Utopias. Donald E Pitzer, Ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
Noyes, John Humphrey. 1870. “The Clermont Phalanx.” History of American Socialisms. Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott & Co, pp.366-76.