Oneida
From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A fascinating and unusual chapter in American history about a religious community that held radical notions of equality, sex, and religion---only to transform itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century, into a successful silverware company and a model of buttoned-down corporate propriety.
In the early nineteenth century, many Americans were looking for an alternative to the Puritanism that had been the foundation of the new country. Amid the fervor of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, John Humphrey Noyes, a spirited but socially awkward young man, attracted a group of devoted followers with his fiery sermons about creating Jesus’ millennial kingdom here on Earth. Noyes established a revolutionary community in rural New York centered around achieving a life free of sin through God’s grace, while also espousing equality of the sexes and “complex marriage,” a system of free love where sexual relations with multiple partners was encouraged. Noyes’s belief in the perfectibility of human nature eventually inspired him to institute a program of eugenics, known as stirpiculture, that resulted in a new generation of Oneidans who, when the Community disbanded in 1880, sought to exorcise the ghost of their fathers’ disreputable sexual theories. Converted into a joint-stock company, Oneida Community, Limited, would go on to become one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of silverware, and their brand a coveted mark of middle-class respectability in pre- and post-WWII America.
Told by a descendant of one of the Community’s original families, Ellen Wayland-Smith's Oneida is a captivating story that straddles two centuries to reveal how a radical, free-love sect, turning its back on its own ideals, transformed into a purveyor of the white-picket-fence American dream.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this impressively thorough and engaging work, Wayland-Smith tells the story of the Oneida Community, a 19th-century utopian Christian commune that later became known for silverware manufacturing. The author, a descendent of community founder John Humphry Noyes, combines stellar research with exceptional critical analysis that considers the community in light of the work of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and George Bernard Shaw. Organized in upstate New York in 1848, Oneida was marked by a practical approach to finances and countercultural religious beliefs, including free love or "complex marriage." A schism split the religious community and it dissolved as Noyes grew old, but his descendants continued to run Oneida's business operations primarily silk, animal trap, and iron spoon factories. Their spoon factory soon shone brightest, becoming one of the top silverware companies in the country until its 2006 bankruptcy. Wayland-Smith demonstrates that Oneida was very much a product of its time, placing the community in the context of the Second Great Awakening and the expansion of American capitalism while highlighting Noyes's incorporation of communism, utopianism, eugenics, and spiritualism (among other aspects of industrial modernism) into his belief system. This book is a fascinating look into the strange history of Oneida silverware and how its origins reflect an exhilarating period of American history.
