World Famous Cults and Fanatics (13 page)

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The Oneida Community

Smith’s advocacy of plural marriage was undoubtedly one of the chief causes of later hostility to the Mormons.
Another prophet from Vermont whose views caused equal
indignation nevertheless succeeded in avoiding martyrdom, and established one of the most successful and prosperous communities in the history of religious dissent.

To his disciples, John Humphrey Noyes was an inspired prophet and a great spiritual leader, but to most of his contemporaries he was a libertine whose doctrines of free love and “complex
marriage” were a danger to the community.
There were many strange religious communities in America in the nineteenth century: the Shakers (so called because they went into convulsions of
religious ecstasy that made them shake all over), the Ephrata, the Rappites, Zoarites and many others.
Most of these were “Perfectionists” – that is, they rejected the notion that
man is a miserable sinner as unnecessarily pessimistic and taught that, through Divine Grace, man can achieve perfection.
The Shakers believed that God is both male and female by nature, so women
were as important as men in their religious rites, many of which looked like orgies.
But the Shakers taught the importance of strict chastity.

The Oneida Community

The 1830s and 1840s were a time of tremendous religious revivals in America, to such an extent that one portion of New York State was known as the Burnt Over Region because the fires of
revivalism had burned so fiercely there.
Men like Hiram Sheldon, Erasmus Stone and Jarvis Rider preached their gospel in the cotton village of Manlius and their converts adopted the name of the
Saints.
One of the subjects that fascinated them was whether the old marriage vows would still be binding when the New Heaven and New Earth arrived.
(Most of the great religious revivals were based
on the conviction that the Day of Judgement was just around the corner.) It was John Humphrey Noyes who provided a startling and controversial answer to that question.

John Humphrey Noyes was born at Brattleboro, Vermont, the son of a Congressman; he studied law, then divinity He was a man of considerable magnetism and remarkable intellect and he seems to have
spent the two years following his conversion (at the age of twenty) in religious broodings and wrestlings.
He found that he simply could not accept that he was a miserable sinner.
Then, when he was
twenty-two, the answer suddenly revealed itself to him in a blinding flash of revelation.
Reading the Gospel of St John, he could see clearly that Jesus had announced the Second Coming within one
generation of his own lifetime – that is, in the year
AD
70.
But if Jesus had already come to earth, then the Kingdom of God was already here.
In that case, why was
there so much sin on earth?
The answer must be because people were unaware of the Second Coming.
This, Noyes could now see and explained why he himself could never feel that he was a sinner.
He
wasn’t.
He was already saved.
All he had to do was to live according to the gospels and nothing could go wrong.

The Bible said that in heaven there would be no marriage or giving in marriage.
The Shakers also accepted this and for them it meant an obligation to celibacy.
Noyes did not agree.
Sex is
obviously necessary to continue the race.
What the Bible meant was obviously that all men were married to all women and vice versa.
In
The Battle Axe
, the newspaper of the Perfectionists, he
published in 1837 a letter in which he explained that “at the marriage supper of the Lamb .
.
.
every dish is free to every guest”.
Sexual intercourse is one of the best things of life
– men and women were intended to “reflect upon each other the love of God”.
Sexual shame was a consequence of the Fall, so all the Saved should now abandon it.
Men and women
should have sex together just as they felt inclined, regarding it as a sacrament.

At the age of twenty-three, Noyes returned to his home in Putney, Vermont, and preached his views; he converted a number of his own family.
He married the daughter of the State Governor and one
of his disciples, J.
L.
Skinner, married his sister.
In 1840, Noyes and a number of disciples founded the Putney Community, which consisted of seven houses and a store on five hundred acres of
fertile land.
They spent the afternoons in manual labour to support themselves and the rest of the time in debate, prayer, reading, and teaching various subjects; including Latin, Greek and
Hebrew.

Meanwhile, Noyes continued to brood on the problems posed by his doctrines of “free love”.
In 1846, he saw the answer.
The problem with sexual intercourse was that it often produced
unwanted results in the form of children.
Mrs Harriet Noyes had produced five babies in six years and four had been stillborn.
The answer was simple.
Men and women should have full sexual
intercourse, with orgasm taking place in the vagina only when they wished to produce children.
For the rest of the time, the man must teach himself continence – not abstention.
He could place
his penis in the vagina but he must exercise severe self-discipline not to have an emission.
It was a method that would later become known as the
karezza
, a term invented by Dr Alice Bunker
Stockham of Ohio.
Noyes pointed out that this method
“vastly increases
pleasure” (his italics).
This doctrine was complemented by the notion of “complex marriage”
– that every man should regard all women as his wives and vice versa.

Noyes was not a man to keep his ideas secret – religious prophets seldom are – and he preached “male continence” (i.e.
the
karezza)
and “complex
marriage” quite openly.
His neighbours were naturally outraged at what they took to be a public rejection of all decency.
(Even nowadays, a community with these ideas would probably have a
hard time of it if they lived in the vicinity of a small town.) There was public outrage and the following year, Noyes was indicted on a charge of adultery.
He decided that his great vision was too
important to be destroyed by a few bigots.
Fortunately, some of his disciples had already set up a community near Oneida Lake, about sixty miles away, with twenty-three acres of land.
In 1847,
Noyes and his disciples moved there and set up the Oneida Community.

What followed was a typical American success story – success preceded by disappointment and hard work.
There were only two log houses, a log hut and an old sawmill; the disciples were
obliged to sleep in garrets and outhouses for another twelve years.
There were many hardships until an inventor called Sewell Newhouse joined the community; he saved it from bankruptcy by inventing
a steel trap which the community proceeded to manufacture.
They made travelling bags, satchels, preserved fruit and silk, and their workmanship made them widely known.
They acquired more land and
more people joined them.
Two years after the community was formed, another branch was started at Brooklyn, and then others at Wallingford, Newark, Putney, Cambridge and Manlius.
By 1878 there were
over three hundred members.
They had built a large brick house in which they all lived.
They had factories, offices, a school, a carpenter’s shop, barns and stables.
The Mansion House –
the main building – was centrally heated, with baths and labour-saving kitchens.
The community also employed over two hundred workers from outside and treated them well.

The aspect that has chiefly interested posterity was the sexual innovation.
Any man could propose love-making to any woman (or, indeed, vice versa) and she was free to reject him.
Oddly enough,
direct courtship was not allowed – a man who wanted to sleep with a woman had to approach her through the intermediary of a third person.
What “male continence” (or
coitus
reservatus
) meant in practice was that the man put his penis into the woman’s vagina, then they lay still for anything up to an hour and a quarter.
The woman was allowed to climax but the
man was not expected to do so – even after withdrawal – Noyes denounced Robert Dale Owen’s idea of
coitus interruptus
as “Male incontinence plus evasion”.
The
male was supposed to stay in the woman until he lost his erection and this was believed to obviate any frustration and nervous tension.
Noyes claimed that his community had a far better record of
less nervous illness than the outside community, while failing to recognize that there may have been other explanations for the situation.

As a system of sexual and moral hygiene “complex marriage” seems to have been highly successful.
Boys lost their virginity soon after puberty, girls somewhat later.
An older person
of the opposite sex was generally chosen to initiate the young – one of the aspects of “complex marriage” that horrified the “outside world”, which felt a mixture of
envy and moral indignation at the idea of a middle-aged man or woman being allowed to deflower a fifteen-year-old.
One visitor wrote: “The majority of the old women are hideous and loathsome
in appearance and it seems to me the most horrible fate in the world to be linked with them.”
But Noyes himself, as the father of the community (he was even known as Father Noyes), naturally
had a wider freedom of choice than most – after the age of fifty-eight he fathered eight children.
It is not clear whether this was accidental or intentional.
The community practised eugenics
– which Noyes called stirpiculture – and at one stage, twenty-four men and twenty women were selected for an experiment in selective breeding.
But “accidents” also happened
– on average one every eighteen months.

Accounts of the community make clear that it was not a sexual free-for-all.
The women dressed modestly, looking rather like the Chinese in long white trousers covered by a skirt.
Any tendency by
a couple to fall in love was regarded as selfish and “idolatrous”, and was discouraged by the system of “mutual criticism”, which usually meant that the person to be
criticized was summoned before a committee, who then detailed his or her faults.
People often requested mutual criticism just as someone today might go to a psychiatrist.
One historian of the
movement, Mark Holloway, in
Heavens on Earth
(1951) has recorded that it was also used successfully to cure physical ailments, demonstrating that Father Noyes also understood about
psychosomatic illness.
There was one case in which “mutual criticism” went further: when William Mills, a man in his early sixties – with an unattractive wife – tried to
initiate more than his share of teenage virgins with the aid of sweets and alcohol, and as a result was hurled unceremoniously into a snowdrift.

Close attachments among children were also discouraged as selfish, which caused a certain amount of heartache.
Otherwise, the children had an enviably pleasant time.
They were allowed to sleep
as late as they liked in the morning and there were dances, plays, pantomimes and other forms of entertainment for them.
Nor were they deprived of parental affection.
A mother weaned her child,
then placed it in the Children’s House where, until the age of three, it spent the daylight hours.
After that, children also spent the night there but parents could visit them as often as
they liked and take them for walks.
They left the Children’s House at fourteen, when they were ready for sexual initiation and to join the adult community.

The adults also had a pleasant time of it once the community was well-established.
Most members were supervisors rather than workers and they could change their jobs to avoid monotony.
Times of
meetings, amusements and meals were also changed for the same reason.
There was fishing, hunting, boating and swimming at Oneida Lake, twelve miles away, and they could visit other communities.