Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. Many of us will simulate a day in Plymouth Colony more than four centuries ago although the way we do it will be a far cry from what really happened. Often not acknowledged by those who cling to that idea is that the colony we celebrate today was an experiment in socialism and that experiment was repeated several times in Missouri.
Plymouth is an early example of the human search for Utopia, a place defined by British social philosopher Sir Thomas More a century earlier as a place of a perfect social and political system. California historian Robert V. Hine defined such a community as “a group of people who are attempting to establish a new social pattern based upon a vision of the ideal society and who have withdrawn themselves from the community at large…”
Plymouth began as a socialist utopia not by the wishes of the religious group seeking to escape the oppression of the Church of England but by the demands of the businessmen who allowed them aboard the Mayflower.
The Council of New England created a contract that was signed by the church separatists we now call Pilgrims in the summer of 1620. The new colony would be jointly owned for seven years. But the separatists, not having funds to invest in the colony, would have to work off their debt. Profits would go into one pot with expenses paid from that fund. After seven years the profits would be divided according to the number of shares that each settler held. Land and houses would be jointly owned and the separatists were required to work seven days a week. When several of the group dropped out, the organizers of the expedition recruited other adventurers to take their place.
So the Pilgrims became, in effect, indentured servants in a socialist colony. Their debt was not fully paid off for 28 years. By then the Puritans, who had first arrived in 1629, far overshadowed the Plymouth Colony. John Butman and Simon Targett in New World, Inc., record that Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay merged along with the islands of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to become the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
By then, the leaders of the socialist colony of Plymouth had realized communal ownership and communal sharing was not working. Colony leader William Bradford and his supporters decided to allow private ownership of the land. Each family was given a parcel. “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them,” he wrote.
The search for a utopian community in America did not end with Bradford’s pilgrims giving up on communal living. And in some places, it still goes on.
Roger Grant wrote in the Missouri Historical Review in 1971, “Missouri’s Utopian movement, which became one of the largest in the country in terms of number of colonies established, followed the national pattern of having communities that were both religious and secular, communistic and cooperative.”
The first group of utopians to come to Missouri, he says, were Joseph Smith’s Mormons in 1831 who arrived in Jackson County, planning to establish a “New Jerusalem,” a communistic religious community, near Independence. But Missourians felt Freedom of Religion did not include Mormons—much as the Puritans of New England felt that those who did not follow their strict Puritan policies had to be expelled—thus leading Baptists Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson to found Rhode Island.
German mystic William Keil created the towns of Bethel and Nineveh in northeast Missouri after becoming dissatisfied with the Methodist Church. As he was forming his movement, some dissatisfied followers of “Father” George Rapp joined up, bringing with them Rapp’s communistic ideas but not bringing with them his ideas about celibacy. But he became worried that the outside world was encroaching on his kingdom, so he took his followers to Oregon, where the movement died when he died. Bethel still exists as a community.
Others tried to form utopian communities as years went by. Andreas Dietsch founded New Helvetia in Osage County. He believed agriculture was the key to a good life, that all property had to be community property because, as Grant wrote, such an arrangement would prevent “man’s greed from destroying the good life.” But he died before his community could be established.
Cheltenham, a secular community, was founded in 1856 by French communist Etienne Cabet, floundered early and his flock moved to Nauvoo, Illinois after the Mormons abandoned it for Salt Lake City. This movement also died when its founder died. Cheltenham is now a neighborhood in St. Louis.
Alcander Longley created several communal colonies, beginning with Reunion, in Jasper County in 1868, Friendship in Dallas County in 1872 and another Friendship Community in Bollinger County in 1879, Principia in Polk County in 1881, Jefferson County’s Altruistic Society in 1886 and others in other years in other places, and Altro in 1898. Lack of Capital doomed all of these places within a short time.
Agnostic George H. Walser founded Liberal, in Barton County, as a town that restricted religious buildings and saloons and tried to replace religion with intellectual organizations. He built a fence to keep churches out but Christians moved inside the fence and held services over Walser’s objection. Liberal survives but not as the isolated intellectual utopia Walser hoped for.
So tomorrow, we celebrate socialism in Plymouth, throughout this country, and in Missouri. And we celebrate the triumph of capitalism over socialism, as happened in so many utopian communities in our nation’s and our state’s histories.
“Socialism” has lost its meaning as an effort for all to share equally in the bounty of our nation and has become a political epithet spoken largely from one side of the political aisle.
Perhaps there’s room to give thanks tomorrow for the things that have been branded as “socialism” in our history— “every advance the people have made,” as our own Harry Truman put it. “Socialism is what they called public power…social security, bank deposit insurance…free and independent labor organizations…anything that helps all the people.”
The Pilgrims, and people such as Walser, Longley, Kiel, Cabet, Dietsch, and others here and elsewhere show us how Socialism does not work. But when a farmer is able to turn on an electric light, when the retired person gets a social security check, when our money is safe if the bank is not, a little socialism sure is nice.
The Pilgrims never found the utopia they came here to enjoy. All these years later, we’re still looking for it, too.
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