perfectionists and the weather: The Oneida community's quest for meteorological utopia, 1848-1879, The

Environmental History, Oct 2002 by Meyer, William B

There has always been-and, modern environmentalism notwithstanding, there no doubt remains-much about the environment that people would willingly alter if they could. Visions of a perfect earthly future have routinely incorporated a reconstructed earth. Not least have they described the transformation of features so often and so stubbornly unsatisfactory in many ways as weather and climate. Writers in classical antiquity who tried to imagine a terrestrial paradise purged its weather of everything dangerous or merely disagreeable, from extreme temperatures and tempestuous winds to overcast skies. Early Christian representations of the Garden of Eden gave it the same mild and moderate climate as medieval Europeans ascribed to the "Land of Cockaigne": "There is no heat or cold, water or fire, wind or rain, snow or lightning, thunder or hail. Neither are there storms. Rather, there is eternally fine, clear weather ... It is always a wonderfully agreeable May." Two geographers who made a study of the utopian novel found that the genre characteristically presents the weather as "either an equable given or something totally under man's control."1

But there is a second and quite different way in which meteorological utopia can be sought. It does not depend on the perfecting of the elements by divine or natural favor or by human effort. It tries to make the weather unobjectionable without altering it physically. What will be abolished in this kind of paradise is not the weather that people think bad, but their reasons for thinking it bad. The causes of complaint lie not in the weather itself, it is assumed, but in human beings, their attitudes, and their social and technological arrangements. If those attributes and arrangements are reformed, dissatisfaction with weather would disappear.. An unnamed character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) expresses this point of view. Ile and several companions are riding through a surprise April snowstorm to join a newly founded utopian community outside of Boston. He reproaches the narrator, Miles Coverdale, for grumbling about the weather. They can never consider themselves "regenerated men," he admonishes Coverdale, until they feel as thankful for "a February northeaster" as they do for "the softest breeze of June."2

Even as Hawthorne's book appeared, another band of utopians was beginning a deliberate and sustained attempt to follow just that principle. The "Perfectionists," followers of the unorthodox religious and social thinker John Humphrey Noyes, lived and worked in central New York state from 1848 until their Oneida Community was dissolved and reconstructed on more conventional lines in 1879-80. Though it lasted for barely thirty years, and its membership never much exceeded three hundred, Oneida was one of the most famous and successful of nineteenth-century American utopian experiments. In subsequent years it has been one of the most studied. Noyes and his followers earned note or notoriety in their day and have retained it into ours because of their efforts to reform the relations of society. Such institutions as common property, "complex marriage," "mutual criticism," and "stirpiculture" scandalized many of their contemporaries and have fascinated many modern scholars. Yet the Perfectionists aspired also to reform human relations with God and with God's creation, the terrestrial environment. In particular, they claimed that their way of life was suited as no other was to coping with the weather. They made the most sustained collective effort in American history to improve the weather by rooting out the causes of discontent with it.

Their efforts are of interest for several reasons. Human relations with weather and climate remain a somewhat neglected area of environmental history. Much of the work that has been done deals with the effects of climatic change or with the closely analogous case of a change of climate experienced when groups migrate from one zone to another. Less attention has been given to the ways in which weather and climate change in their meaning as human activities change, or to the differences in their meaning at any one time for different groups of people. The attempts of the Perfectionists to find a way of life better suited than that of their neighbors to the same environment offers a rich and well-documented case study in this vein. The Community members' attempts to put into practice their theories about weather and society-above all, their insistence on the point, now widely accepted, that human relations with nature cannot be understood apart from the social relations linking humans with one another-also represent a significant episode in the history of both American environmental and American utopian thought.

The Community and the Weather-Theory

Born in northern New England in 1811, John Humphrey Noyes attended college at Dartmouth and studied for the ministry at the Andover Theological Seminary and the Yale Divinity School. Expelled from the latter for unorthodoxy, he began preaching and publishing his ideas throughout the northeastern United States. In 1838, newly married, he settled in his childhood home of Putney, Vermont. Around him collected a group of devoted followers attracted by the force of his reasoning and the power and charm of his personality. Because of growing local hostility, Noyes decided in 1848 to move his small community to a site that he was offered in Madison County, in central New York, along the banks of Oneida Creek. For a time, he maintained branch communities in Putney and in Brooklyn, and a larger and more enduring offshoot was established in Wallingford, Connecticut; but from 1848 onward, Oneida was the center of activities for Noyes and his followers.3