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

Environmental History, Oct 2002 by Meyer, William B

Much of what they said on this score echoed the assertion of the American Fourierites that community living offered great advantages over individual family life in coping with weather. It was a claim far more congenial to Noyes and his followers than were the hopes of the Fourierites for transforming the global climate. The large collective dwellings of the Fourierite community, by replacing many wasteful individual family homes, would enjoy a great economy of both fuel and labor through a modern system of central heating in winter. Uniting living, dining, and recreational space, they would offer an expanse of shelter from the elements that individualistic family life hopelessly lacked. Through covered and enclosed galleries, one could walk "from house to house, and from workshop to workshop, without exposure to the inclemencies of weather," saving money on protective clothing and benefiting in health. Heavy unemployment in the winter was a fact of life in the mid-nineteenth century northern United States. But under the rational planning of Association, Fourier's disciples claimed, "there never could be a season when any should be idle because they could not obtain work," nor even a day when the weather outdoors meant that nothing could be done. Tasks would be shifted around to harmonize with prevailing conditions. There would always be work, "either in doors or out, according to the weather," - "full employment for all, in all weathers, and at all seasons."14

Noyes in his Putney years had read the Fourierite literature with great interest, and although he and his followers had many quarrels with it, on these points they found common ground.15 The three early annual reports of the Oneida Community and the Circular expounded in very similar terms the advantages of joint life and livelihood in coping with the elements. Even their use of the Fourierite term "Association" as a synonym for their own "Community" or "Communism" is evidence of how much they borrowed, while enriching it with their own distinctive beliefs and placing the result on a quite different foundation of theory. The idea that the many economies of scale and advantages in efficiency of associated over individual life would best satisfy basic needs, make community life more appealing, and free the members as far as possible to focus their efforts on the attainment of perfection harmonized with their own conviction that the institutions of heaven were the ones best suited to earthly life. Many families living together could afford "improvements which but few single families can adopt." They could enjoy tools of adaptation-shared outerwear for cold, wet, and snowy weather; irrigation works to offset droughts; the large sheltered, enclosed, and heated space of the communal dwelling-that individual families could not afford. A community of the proper size, engaging in a diversity of occupations, could keep its members busy at all seasons, following an overall program of "mechanical pursuits in the winter, and gardening in the summer." It could easily muster, as the individual household could not, the many hands needed for "bees," short bursts of intensive labor in highly seasonal or weather-sensitive trades. A community was "far better able to make hay while the sun shines'... than a single farmer is, because it can put on extra force-call all hands to the field." Nor need a farmer be idled by rain "in Association where many trades are carried on, some in-doors as well as out." Or, as one issue of the Circular argued, "It is a great advantage of the combined industry of Association that it makes work independent of the weather." By pooling a variety of interests, a community could also ensure that effects of weather were balanced: Though some members might be hurt by a storm or cold spell, others would be helped, and the group as a whole would come out ahead. Thus the tendency toward grumbling was corrected in that members were encouraged to appreciate the good in any weather "sympathetically" when they could not do so "individually." Breaking worldly ties, finally, made it easier to discard practices that were maladapted to the weather yet imposed by prevailing opinions. The Oneidans's ways of life would be tested not by fashion and convention but by inspiration and experience.16