Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table

by Ellen Wayland-Smith, Khristine Hvam (Narrator)

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. When the Community disbanded in 1880, a new generation of Oneidans 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. Told by a descendant of one of the Community's original families, Oneida is a captivating story that straddles two centuries to reveal how a radical, free-love sect transformed into a purveyor of the white-picket-fence American dream.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, American History, Cults, Audiobook, Book Club

Audio CD

First published June 7, 2016

Reviews

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of all 19th century communal experiments, Oneida stands out for its success and its foundation on free love. (Interestingly, Shaker communities also survived into the 20th century with the opposite approach to sex.) A descendant of the founders, Ellen Wayand-Smith, digs into the archives to present a portrait of Oneida at the various stages of its development.

As he came of age, conventional Christian beliefs about sex weighed heavily on John Humphrey Noyes. From his powerful dreams and visions, he developed a philosophy that integrated free love into Christian beliefs. In his view, the nuclear family was a selfish institution; it did not conform to biblical teachings about love and sharing. He and like-minded Christians pooled their assets to form a colony based on the principle of Bible Communism where sex and material goods were shared.

What Wayland-Smith describes is not a Fruitland where religious intellectuals suffer agricultural drudge. This group starts with resources, builds a silk factory and builds traps for game. The communal life is for the colonists who work 6 hours a day. For the employees, conditions and wages are just like any other 19th century sweat shop.

For all the sex, there are few children. The community practiced “coitus reservatus” (men who could not conform were assigned post-menopausal women) which over 50+ years and 200+ people produced very few pregnancies. Freed from life-threatening maternity/childbirth and long hours of child care, women served many roles in the community.

Love was not totally free, “Complex Marriage” came with strings. John Noyes seemed to control all “interviews” and seemed to have to approve child bearing. He controlled the “introduction of virgins” (Noyes, himself, introduced the females; males, by post-menopausal women). There were separations and penalties when couples fell in love (they got “sticky”) or preferred their own children (philoprogenitiveness ).

Wayland Smith takes the reader through all of this and forward into the community’s eugenics experiments (a good example, of how much control Noyes had), the Comstock Law and Noyes’ resulting flight to Niagara Falls, Canada, the dissatisfied youth, changes in corporate structure, enlightened labor policies, outsider control, bankruptcy and Oneida’s near-non-existence as a sold off asset.

This book is a fascinating account, but there are a few weaknesses, that, perhaps a second edition will clear up. There are references to communities in Willingham, CT and Brooklyn, NY but these are not well defined. The end seems both stretched and rushed with long descriptions of WWII and post WWII America and little on the community. It gets unclear as to whether the factories are in Canada or the US or both. There are 3 pages on the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey who wanted to (but did not) study Oneida, which “may” have led to the burning of the Noyes Archives. There is nothing on the Oneida Tower, a very visible landmark, which should be a significant milestone for the company. The current status of “the Mansion” (the author visits her parents there, but it seems to be an historic park) and the Kenwood community are also unclear.

This is defiantly worth a read if you are interested in any of the topics covered in this book.

[Irene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most people will recognize “Oneida” as an iconic brand of 20th century silverware. Fewer people will be aware that it began as a 19th century utopian community denouncing monogamy as spiritually limiting and espousing free love. This was an interesting history of the community and its transformation into a successful silver company.

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book, especially to understand the connection between electricity, sex, and immortality. ;) I found the author’s writing to be a bit long-winded. I also felt she infused so much of her own personal opinions and judgments that I didn’t know if I was always getting the facts. It is understandable since she is a descendant of the community, but something I didn’t care for. Overall it was a bit dry.

[Liss Carmody · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was meant to be my final book of 2019 - however, I got busy through the holidays and couldn't quite carve out enough time to push through to the end before the arbitrary deadline. Alas! It's a very good read about a really fascinating time in American (and specifically American religious) history. The Great Awakening was a wild and rebellious period and a lot of unique counter-cultural movements broke out, including a good number of utopian communes and more than a few groups dedicated to thwarting traditional sexual mores.

The Oneida Community was somewhat unusual in the way they sought to combine both through their practice of Bible Communism, which is a complicated hybridization of Christianity, socialism, polyamory, and 19th century feminism. You probably think you have an idea of what that might look like and you'd be sort of right, but also fairly wrong, because the 19th century approach to all of these ideas is quite different to what we in our 21st-century minds conceptualize them as being. Oneida's Perfectionist doctrines are theologically flawed but interesting to dissect, and the community (which lasted in this incarnation for about 30 years and two generations - not too bad considering how utopian communities usually go) took its religious conceptualization really seriously. In fact, the gradual incursion of skepticism and religious doubt in the second and ongoing generations is arguably the single greatest thing that led to the group's downfall as a communal society. Their sexual, social, and gender practices are likewise interesting to examine, being for the most part fairly earnestly applied and governed with a fair degree of liberty between the 200+ participants. Their spiritual head exerted a great deal of power over his adherents so it's not fair to say that they acted perfectly at liberty (and indeed, writings indicate they took special pride in their distinction from other free-love adherents who were less structured in their relationships), nor is it accurate to say that there were likely not overtones or undertones of power abuse occurring at the same time. Not everyone had the same degree of power in negotiating the complicated dynamics of Oneida's sexual web and it seems likely that there were many cases in which this was problematic. On the other hand, Noyes' doctrine of separating the social and procreative aspects of sex provides one of the first fairly successful instances of broadly-used birth control practice.

This would all have been interesting enough as a topic, but Oneida has one quirky unfolding layer after another to explore. You would have expected this experiment in communal counter-cultural living to fall apart after a few years, right, and be consigned to the annals of historical oddities? Wrong! Although the community did eventually dissolve formally, they did so via democratic process and the second generation of descendants rebanded together within ten years to form a company town in the same place continuing the manufacture of silverware which the original community had been producing as one of its several business ventures. Although the old community's anti-mainstream lifestyle disappeared, the second act carried along some of the communal attitudes in the way the business managers (most of them Community scions) engineered a business model in which all participants from the CEOs through the factory line workers had a share in the profits of the company. The second half of the book covers the Oneida company's successes and failures at rebranding itself and its silver over the course of the succeeding century, including the way that later generations increasingly sought to distance themselves from and cover up the history of their original ancestors. This is considerably interesting as well as the author is, herself, a descendant of that community line.

So yeah! Quirky interesting history about an odd group of people I didn't know that much about, neatly set out. I enjoyed this a lot. I could have read a much, much more detailed book about the old community, to be honest. I would read historical fiction set in the Oneida Community. It's a similarly charged, culture-challenging time for us now, in 2020, and it's refreshing and somehow reassuring to remember that people have, across time, been freethinking and breaking from tradition in their own ways.

[Krista the Krazy Kataloguer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was pleased to read this book discussion choice from my local public library because it deals with the Oneida Community, a 19th-century utopian group that lived just a few miles south of where I presently reside. What a fascinating group they were! John Humphrey Noyes, the founder, was born and grew up in Putney, Vermont, and grew to believe that "Bible communism" was the best type of society. He and his followers pooled all their possessions and money and built a mansion and farm in Oneida, New York, in the 1840s, where they practiced communal living, free love, and stirpiculture (eugenics--selective inbreeding to produce the best people). They earned their living by producing and selling traps, fruit, and, eventually, silverware.

At the time they were founded, many in New York State were questioning established Christian religions, and so society was ripe for this kind of social experiment. As time went on, however, attitudes changed, and the "outside world" turned against the community's practices, especially their free loving. By the 1870s Noyes felt so threatened that he abandoned his community and fled to Canada. The Oneida Community eventually became Oneida Community Limited, which focused on producing silverware. They abandoned free love and were quick to marry each other or leave the group. OCL continued to produced silverware right up until they were forced to admit to bankruptcy in 2006.

Though Wayland-Smith, a descendant of one of the original Oneida members, writes sometimes rather dryly, nevertheless the story is fascinating. I came away with the sense that the entire movement came about because John Humphrey Noyes was shy and sexually repressed. He set himself up in his community so that he had many sexual partners (some his own relatives!) and it was considered normal. He also had a habit from youth of running away when things became overwhelming or dangerous--hence, his flight to Canada when a reverend from Hamilton College threatened to cause trouble for him. Do I think he was self-serving? Yes, but I also think he had convinced himself that his way of thinking was right. And I have to admit, I understand why he tried to find a middle road between democracy and capitalism. Under democracy and capitalism, the individual is encouraged to seek self-betterment, often without thought as to the good of the whole. Noyes believed that communism was better, but I think it can never be perfect either because it presumes that the individual will always work unselfishly toward the good of the whole, and people are too often selfish.

Wayland-Smith focused a lot on Noyes' beliefs and how they fit in with the society of the day. It was sometimes difficult to follow the intricacies of his ideas, even though I had previous knowledge of some of it. I would have liked to hear more about the daily lives of these people, but I'll have to read some of the published diaries of various members to fill in those details. Now that I've read this history, I must visit the Mansion House, which now contains a museum and is open for tours. I also know someone who rents an apartment in the Mansion House, so maybe I can wangle an invitation... If you live in New York State or are interested in 19th-century utopian experiments, this is the book to read. Highly recommended.

[Claire Lovell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Spectacularly dull for a book that had a chapter called "sex battery." I guess it'll take even more than bizarro sex communism to make 19th century Revivalism interesting to me.
Several book club members brought in their silverware.

[Susan O · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Ellen Wayland-Smith, a descendant of the original founders of the Oneida community, digs into the commune's history and tells the story of how they started, but of more interest to me, how they changed and survived for over 100 years.

A commune espousing free love was not unusual in the years before the Civil war. There were a number of them that experienced varying amounts of success, but most of them fizzled out within a relatively short time. The Oneida community was able to redefine itself and stick together making changes in their views of marriage, the community organization and leadership, and in how the business was organized and run. They were impacted by many changes in society including views on women, birth control, the Comstock laws, labor relations, and women flooding the work force during WWII and the expectation that they would leave those jobs when the men returned. Probably one of the most significant changes was the rise of succeeding generations to leadership.

I found the first part of the book, the founding of the community and the beliefs of the leader, Noyes, interesting, and the last third or so fascinating about the evolution of the beliefs and organizational efforts to keep it alive. The middle of the book contained more information than I wanted about the individuals and their sexual partners and complications of the life. Although interesting and necessary to understand the group dynamic, it got a little boring in that part to me.

Although interesting, this book didn't quite rise to a 4 star level, but it was worth read if you are interested in 19th century utopian communities and ideas, or in the evolution of the business and how they changed with the times.

[Sher · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Written by a descendent of the Oneida community, this book tells the story of the rise of Oneida, a nineteenth century free-love community, founded by John Humphrey Noyse to its fall fifty plus years later. One of the longest surviving utopian communes in nineteenth century America. This is a wild journey into a fully systematized new society theory and how it worked and did not work. Remember Oneida silverware - this is also the story of a utopian corporation that flourished and fell along with the commune. Fascinating piece of outrageous American history -- unsettling and yet some of their ideas -- such a birth control and women's rights are in full operation today.

[Oscar · Rating 4 out of 5]

We should try this again. But leave out the eugenics

[Noel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and well-presented book of the Oneida community. I've read many accounts, and what I like best about this one is that it traces the line of the OC past its abandonment of Complex Marriage to its present-day families.

[Steve Smits · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the Oneida Community is nearby me (I have been to the Mansion House several times) its history has always fascinated me. The community was one of a number of Utopian societies that emerged in the 19th century. It was most widely known at the time (and still today) for its practice of group marriages where multiple partners would engage in marital relations. The Oneidas also experimented late in their association with a form of selective genetic breeding, called "stirpiculture", whereby couples were paired by the elders and sanctioned to have children, supposedly to advance desirable genetic qualities. The Oneidas were influenced by the eugenics movement that was extant in American at the time.

Professor Wayland-Smith is a descendant of the Oneida adherents. She has written a scholarly, but readable, account of the Oneidas with considerable elucidation on the theology of founder John Humphrey Noyes. Noyes was swept up in the religious fervor of the mid-19th century. He developed a view that the bible called on Christians to share their lives, their goods and even each other in a completely communal way; he called it "Bible Communism". It seems apparent that Noyes was tormented by sexual urges he found difficult to reconcile with his religion, but it would be a misinterpretation to conclude that he formed his society as a phony gateway to promiscuous sexual relations. Noyes's theology was complex and genuine. Wayland-Smith comments on the religiosity that was prevalent in Upstate New York in the mid-1800's. (She mentions Charles Grandison Finney who staged his revivals all across the region, including the village where I now reside.) The intensity of ecstatic religious emotion unleashed by the revivals she links, probably correctly, to enhancing the the libido of participants.

The Oneidas were admired for their industriousness and excellent business sense. Among their early business ventures was the manufacture of hunting traps which were widely marketed across the nation. Later, they entered the flatware market and produced for many decades the silverware known as Oneida silver. Sadly, in our globalized economy, the manufacture of flatware by Oneida, Ltd. has gone abroad. The company sought in the modern era to distance itself from the more lascivious and eccentric aura of its past and Wayland-Smith opens the story by describing a quiet move in the late 1940's to burn records that documented the commune's history and practices. The commune's descendants made great efforts to portray themselves as exemplars of gentile and conventional morality.

The role and place of women in the Oneida Community draws attention. Certainly, women of the community were more powerful and on more equal terms with men than is usually seen in 19th century culture.

Wayland-Smith mentions Pierpont "Pete" Noyes, a descendant who became the company's president in the mid-20th century. I had the pleasure of slight acquaintance with Pete Noyes when he was a board member of a human services agency where I worked. Pete was a plain-spoken, delightful man with a wry sense of humor. When I later visited the Mansion House and saw a portrait of John Humphrey Noyes I was struck by the strong family resemblance.

Professor Wayland-Smith has made a great contribution to the remarkable story of the Oneidas. Anyone in the central New York region around Oneida-Kenwood should visit the Mansion House and take the tour.

[Cornmaven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Written by a descendant of the original Oneida Community, this is a fascinating tale of the origins of what most of 20th century people know only as a maker of silverware and other table setting things.

While it's fascinating, it's also very creepy, as you have founder John Humphrey Noyes creating a closed in society based on "Bible Communism," rationalizing free love as the only way to connect with God, and his controlling of who has sex with whom the only way to express it. As I listened to the quotations, I couldn't help but think that this guy is both crazy and brilliant, in terms of his ability to get intelligent people to go along with what he wanted to do. And there is the pesky irony of his community enacting lifestyles that acknowledged some sort of early liberation for women, including freedom from incessant childbirth. How he went about it, however, is kind of weird, and I doubt if men today would embrace it.

Wayland-Smith is very careful to note what the records show and what they do not, but hints at the strong possibility that the Oneida Community as directed by Noyes was incestuous as a matter of ideology. Noyes, along with many others at the end of the 19th/beginning 20th centuries, a firm believer in eugenics and stirpiculture, another creepy and disgusting practice. No wonder all of the official archives were burned at one point in the 20th century. Who would want all of the details to be known once your corporation as become the darling of proper middle class dining?

The marketing genius of Pierrepont Noyes is evident with Wayland-Smith's discussion of ad campaigns that Oneida used to move consumers from high cost sterling silver tableware to silverplate and stainless, and also secure their place settings in post WWII homes by appealing to emotion that rivals anything Don Draper would have done. In fact, it felt as if the Mad Men writers must have read about Oneida at some point in their script writing.

I was not totally thrilled with Wayland-Smith's reading of the story; I kind of felt at parts she made it overly dramatic. But there is no doubt that she has bravely brought all of her family's skeletons to light in this book.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book club selection for November, 2018.

I'm a few chapters in and it's VERY thoroughly researched and maybe a tiny bit more detailed than necessary.

FINAL UPDATE

Not a super readable book. She jumps around in time and among her main characters, not creating a smooth narrative. You get the sense that she based everything she wrote on what her research made available, which is admirable, but doesn't create the most satisfying reading experience. There were so many places where I wanted to know more about a person or how the Community worked*, and many other places where the level of detail was pretty numbing. It's an interesting story, but not always told in the most interesting way.

*I especially thought that she spent absolutely no time discussing the impact of the sexual initiation of these very young girls, which seemed an almost heinous oversight. Perhaps she no longer had records from the Community (as they were destroyed) and no first person accounts, but she interviewed a lot of people and not one of them had anything to say on this subject? I thought her avoidance of the topic was even more noticeable when she ended on a treacly section about her fond memories of youthful Christmases spent at the Mansion.

The NPR podcast about the Community that I heard about 9 months ago was quite intriguing and in some ways more informative than this book.

[Kate Long · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stars: 4
Format: Audiobook
Series: Stand Alone
Steam Level: None

Holy smokes this was a ride. I figured from the title it would be interesting but I didn’t think it would be THAT interesting. The beginning was pretty slow and I nearly put it down, and I probably would have if I wasn’t listening to it. Just get to Putnam, it picks up from there and you’ll see how Noyes’ early life and surrounding history played a part in shaping the community.

Quick Thoughts:
- This story shows just how society swings from conservative about sex to liberal about sex to conservative about sex to liberal about sex, constantly
- This book was bananas
- It was one heck of a turn from what it started out as to selling tableware
- The narrator, Khristin Hvam, for this audiobook was very good and I’ll definitely listen to another by her
- Did I mention it’s bananas?
- There were parts that creeped me out but I applaud the author for including them when it would have been easy not to
- I ended up getting on my phone a lot to look up images/photos of the Oneida Community, so keep yours close
- Bananas… just… bananas

Overall, I strongly recommend getting through the slow beginning (and don’t skip it!) to the real bananas parts later. It’s worth it.

[Regina Merwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book for those who are interested in how a 19th century religious community in the USA maintained itself over so many years and generations. This history touches on a number of topics: Free Love, birth control, eugenics, industry--the Community started out making beartraps to support itself, and eventually morphed into Oneida Community Silver.

There was a lot of exploration of experimental lifestyles in the 19th Century--some of it pretty hilarious, some of it disturbing.

I absolutely love this stuff. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because, being SO well-researched, it wasn't as much of a page-turner as I would have liked.

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very thorough. While I was looking for a book about what made the community a great place to live, as it turned out, it was much more about the religious beliefs of those who founded the community and how they governed the lives of the people who chose to live there. This is an absolutely bizarre episode in American history and I'm glad that the author (a descendent of two of the residents) was willing to write a straightforward account of it all. Crazy.

[Scott Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting subject. I am glad it was written, but it is pretty boring and a bit of a slog to get through. Lots of quotes from old letters and autobiographical books written by members of the Oneida community.
I give it 3 stars for the attempt and research. If you are into reading about cults and/or early communes, you might find this of interest.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was highly fascinating to me. I live in the area and I feel an urge to drive out there to take a better look at the houses around the Mansion since I had not realized they were part of it. I'm much more educated on the topic now and want to learn even more. I did not realize what an influence in society the community played. My heart aches at the burning of all their documents too.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun fact: The Oneida company - the maker of the silverware I own - began as a free-love, open marriage, Christian commune in the mid-1800s. This book is a bit too long and takes off on a few tangents but the story itself is interesting. Plus I just love learning about religious cults. The weirder the better!

[Chris Lund · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wild story. It's incredible how much information actually survives, especially given the amount that was intentionally destroyed. What started off as the whim of an overcompensating, narcissistic lunatic turned out quite a complex community, a unique experiment in human relations, and, somehow, a spoon company. I'll never look at my silverware the same way again.

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a terrifically informative book. Its well written, funny and simply an amazing story that tells us a huge amount about how crazy American culture is and how a Bible sex cult ended up designing most of the silverware used by 20th century Americans. What a ride!

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I grew up in nearby Rome, and shopped at the community store, there was never much talk about the Oneida Community other than history class mentions. It was a fascinating read about a unique community one town over from my childhood home.

[Robin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has the details only a family member would have. Incredible details. Interesting history.

[Brenda Clough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, setting the movement in its historical context (more or less -- the Civil War seems to pass over without touching them).

[Philip Girvan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This remarkable book details the history of the Oneida Community. Oneida was established by the followers of John Humphrey Noyes, an adherent of Bible Communism, and a believer in perfectionism. Matthew 22:30 - For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven (KJV) - provided scriptural underpinning for Noyes’s doctrine of Complex Marriage.

“Community, according to Noyes, was an organic entity that took its directives from God via his own divine inspiration. As in slicing body, God’s energy was infused throughout the whole cell structure of the Community, and the individual was nothing without the energy links to its source and fellow cells. Oneida Communism had never had any truck with rights-based individualism (167).”

Children were raised communally: “[a s]eparate house for children broke up ‘what the Community members called “philoprogenitiveness”, or the natural tendency of parents to favour their own children’” (67). However, by the 1870s, “national movements that questioned the sanctity of marriage and the nuclear family (155)” were losing momentum. The book notes that “[m]oral conservatives were circling the wagons in defense of marriage and the nuclear family” (ibid).

Over time, people from both within and without the Oneida Community challenged Noyes’s notion that he was God’s spokesperson on earth. Congress passed the USA’s first anti-obscenity law on March 3, 1873. Reynolds v. the United States (1879) gave US Congress the power to criminalize bigamy in the Mormon territory of Utah. That same year, having been tipped off that his arrest on charges of statutory rape was immanent, Noyes fled the United States never to return.

Noyes attempted to pass on leadership of the community to his son, Theodore, an agnostic lacking his father’s charisma. Minus the elder Noyes’s “sexual dominance holding the Community together, the center would not hold” (163), a schism within the Oneida Community emerged.

Noyes’s flight to Canada led to the end of Complex Marriage which preceded the Transformation of the Community into a corporation (175). The book describes the shift thus: “Despite the existence of a spiritual caste system within the Oneida Community, the material equality of its members had been an article of faith ... At the breakup, this artificial bubble of equality vanished overnight” (178). The commune transitioned into the Oneida Community Ltd., later Oneida Ltd, focusing economic activities on the production of quality silverware and trying very hard to eliminate all traces of its communal past.

Book provides fascinating documentation of one of the most unique religious movements to emerge from the Second Great Awakening. Recommended.

[Riley · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of information about the community. While 70% of the book is given to the free love aspect of the community, it was the other part of the industrial side I was interested in, having now worked with two companies that license Oneida products.

Some interesting bits of information about that part:

“With the success of their trap manufacturing, the Oneida Community believed that they had finally broken through the third and penultimate line in the great “chain of sin and death” that, according to Noyes’s theology, held humans captive. Having first freed humans from sin, and then having restored proper sexual relations, the Oneidains had now overcome the burden of oppressive labor.” (page 94)

“But OCL’s management expressed little interest in the young turks and their business counsels. By 1892, the control of the OCL had shifted over to a group of retrograde spiritualist, old-time Community men who believed the best way of formulating a business strategy was to consult the spirit of john Humphrey Noves via séances.” (page 187)

The Oneida Community, which had prided itself on emancipating its members – and its women, in particular – from the chains of social competitiveness and fashion, had been reborn from its ashes by cashing in on these very same middle-class fantasies in the twentieth-century female consumers.” (page 199)

“When P.T. Noyes retired as president in 1981, the first “outsider” in Oneida’s 130-year history ascended to the post; all four succeeding presidents, right up until the bankruptcy in 2006, would be outsiders. When Oneida was forced to restructure in 2004, management’s official explanation to stockholders attributed the collapse to the competition of cheap labor abroad, as well as the termination of Oneida’s contract to provide table ware to the airlines in the wake of 9/11. A Forbes magazine article from 2004 hailed much against cheap foreign imports as against the “inbred” culture of the OL board of directors and their stubborn adhesion to the communal values of the old Oneida Community.” (page 264)

“The group of hedge funds that acquired the bankrupt Oneida in 2006 shifted its management to New York City, although they retained a small residual staff in Kenwood who continued to work in the sales office. Then in 2011, Everyware, “a leading global marketer of tabletop and food preparation products for the consumer and foodservice markets,” according to its Web site (http://everywareglobal.com), acquired Oneida for its portfolio.” (page 267)

[Clara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ellen Wayland-Smith’s From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table is a compelling historical narrative concerning a peculiar religious sect in the 19th century that combined philosophies of communism and free love into their “liberated” utopia. All throughout the book, Wayland-Smith relays the story of John Humphrey Noyes and what would eventually be known as his Oneida community with the finesse of a storyteller. She gives context into Noyes’s background and the spiritual and philosophical turbulence of the time that shaped his perspective and informed his later actions in building his community. Wayland-Smith’s narrative style is interesting and persuasive, and she approaches sensitive topics of sexual relations with honest delicacy rather than sensationalism. While she took the part of an impartial narrator for much of the beginning of the book, her style devolves towards the end into the persuasive, contemplative tone of an essayist. The constant reflection back to herself in the story draws one out of the historical context that she is trying to describe. While her presentation of the utopia that was headed by her progenitors seems honest, there is a certain amount of personal reflection that calls into question the accuracy of the story that she is telling. Some of the historical “facts” that she includes in the book are incorrect, making the veracity of the remaining specifics of history questionable. Ultimately, Wayland-Smith’s book provides insight into the why behind a particularly strange and morally reprehensible “spiritual” community. However, the shift in narrative styles and implementation of inaccurate historical information detracts from the overall credibility of the book.

[Sesana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and absorbing account of one of America's little experiments in utopia. The author's personal connection (she's a descendant of several of the founders of the community, including leader Noyes) doesn't seem to get in the way of presenting a relatively neutral account, despite some apparent sympathy for the generations who were left to try to clean up the mess that being a commune that practiced a form of free love and eugenics will inevitably leave behind. I did have a few questions that were left unanswered. For example, Wayland-Smith covers several women who were left without husbands when the community began to turn to traditional marriages, but never why this was the case. Were there more men than women in the community? Were there men that chose not to marry without any impact on their social standing? There seemed to be at least one man who married somebody from outside the community in this generation, so was that part of the issue? Some combination of the above? It is, of course, entirely possible that there is no simple answer to this question, given that huge amounts of documents about the commune era of Oneida have been destroyed, but I felt like Wayland-Smith might have addressed that anyways.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story of the utopian community which eventually became known worldwide for its silverware!!!

I read this book after learning a little about the Oneida experiment from the Podcast “Nice Try” wherein each episode is dedicated to a utopian community experiment. Of course, none of the participants in any of these communities VIEWED their community as experimental; rather, as the author explains quite beautifully in the book’s opening pages, the old “City on a Hill” mythos and ethos is deeply woven into the possibility America represents. Or at least, is supposed to represent.

Though I enjoyed this, there were some spots where the detail started to feel either overwhelming or repetitive.

I’m a bit more excited to crack open Chris Jennings’s Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, which dedicates a chapter each—about 40-50 pages—covering five American Utopian communities. That feels more appropriate in terms of the sort of breadth I’m looking for rather than the granular view of Oneida.

This topic, in general, is of great interest to me as I once organized my entire AP Literature curriculum around characters who seek “return.” The crossroads between 19th and 20th Century psychology and the sociology represented in these utopian endeavors is endlessly fascinating.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I closed the book and felt sad. People who rejected conventional wisdom, people who were (comparatively) free thinkers, joined this group - and then promptly ceased to think for themselves. They gave up their cognitive independence to a cabal. How does that work?

The author researched well, and wrote well. Her perspective was enriched by her status as a direct descendant of Oneida Community members. The “psychosexual” (her word) profile of the cult leader was explored in depth, but how recruits were attracted and retained - that remains a mystery.

So much innovation. So much promise. But then this: “Mutual Criticism” sounded like similar meetings in China during the communist revolution. “Ascending Fellowship” was just creepy.

This book did engender interest on my part, then fascination - what’s next, obsession?

Four stars, and not five, because the author meandered into eddies of European and American intellectual history. She felt had to give (a lot of) time to Marx, Freud, Teddy Roosevelt, among many, many others. These links and influences do exist, but I would have preferred a tighter focus. Either 1) leave it out or 2) put it in a footnote.