From the colonial era on, the United States has had a rich array of self-contained utopian communities, walled off from the mainstream of life and dedicated to pursuing various notions of individual and collective perfection. Although economic factors often made such projects unsustainable in the long term and members tended to float away over time, some utopian and experimental communities left significant marks on American life. The impulse to gather together with groups of like-minded people in the hope of discovering better ways of living still exists today, embodied in a diverse array of groupings, including communes, eco-villages, survivalist camps, religious communities, and mystical retreats.
The 19th century is said to have been a golden age for American utopianism. Most of the earliest such communities were religious. Beginning in the late 18th century, a Protestant sect known as the Shakers established more than a dozen communal settlements in the eastern United States. Although Shaker communities were economically successful, farming and producing distinctive architecture and handicrafts, the Shakers’ numbers eventually dwindled. Their practice of community-wide celibacy, which required men and women to live in separate residences, may have been partly to blame. Another religious community—the Oneida Community, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York—took the opposite approach to sex and reproduction, eschewing monogamous marriage in favor of an arrangement in which any consenting man and woman within the community could be sexual partners. At the same time, the eastern United States was dotted with communities founded by German Pietists fleeing persecution in Europe.
There were also secular utopias, dedicated to visions of social and economic reform. The community of Harmony, Indiana—originally founded by the German Pietist preacher George Rapp—was sold in 1825 to the Welsh industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen. Rechristened New Harmony, the settlement turned out to be much less successful than the experimental communities that Owen had previously established in Great Britain. He was forced to withdraw from New Harmony in 1828, losing most of his fortune in the process. The community of Brook Farm, Massachusetts, was founded as a community based on ideals of Transcendentalism and attracted a number of prominent intellectuals as residents and visitors. But the commune’s financial state was always precarious, and Brook Farm closed in 1847. It was satirized by Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had lived there for six months, in his novel The Blithedale Romance (1852) as a place where some residents did hours of strenuous farmwork while others sat around reading poetry.
Although historians of utopianism tend to focus on the 19th century, the trend continued into the 20th. During the Great Depression a number of cooperative communities were formed in hopes of shielding people against economic misfortune. The decades after World War II saw another boom in the establishment of experimental groups dedicated to moral and spiritual enlightenment and the development of more cooperative ways of living outside of mainstream society. Residents of these communities were often artists, intellectuals, and political radicals. One example is the commune founded by the San Francisco Diggers, a group of activists who took their name from a 17th-century English agrarian communist group. The community, which sought to found a society without money or capitalism, provided social services and staged avant-garde theater in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco from 1966 to 1968.