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Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table
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.
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.
336 pages, Paperback
First published June 7, 2016
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May 14, 2023
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.
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.
May 16, 2018
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.
July 6, 2021
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.
January 6, 2020
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.
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.
October 12, 2017
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.
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.
July 29, 2021
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.
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.
May 22, 2017
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.
Several book club members brought in their silverware.
February 1, 2018
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.
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.
May 1, 2026
I mean, can you get any more American than a free love cult turned spoon manufacturer devoted to reinforcing patriarchal norms around marriage and housekeeping?
The author's relationship to the Oneida family serves a fascinating purpose -- as an insider, she has access to a ton of great primary sources; but she also shies away from going too hard on the more unsavory practices that went on, especially by the founder. Still, part of the fun was listening and going mmm, girl, i don't know about that statement.
The author's relationship to the Oneida family serves a fascinating purpose -- as an insider, she has access to a ton of great primary sources; but she also shies away from going too hard on the more unsavory practices that went on, especially by the founder. Still, part of the fun was listening and going mmm, girl, i don't know about that statement.
May 15, 2018
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.
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.
October 5, 2025
We should try this again. But leave out the eugenics
September 10, 2017
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.
November 2, 2016
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.
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.
February 19, 2017
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.
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.
March 26, 2026
It is telling in this account of a Millennialist sex cult that the author (a descendent of the sect) only reserves the word "cult" for "American society's cult of ruthless moneymaking," "cult of masculinity," and "cult of domesticity." Here we are presented with a tantalizing sex cult complete with harems, incest, a fugitive cult patriarch consumed with narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy despite his altruistic platitudes, yet for the author the only weird rituals and sacrilegious idols are the societal norms and national ethos of the 99.99999999% of Americans not sleeping with their nieces at Oneida. It's like reading a book on David Koresh and the Branch Davidians and getting hit with a harangue about Reaganomics and the nuclear family. The following stands out as a doozy:
"Contrary to popular assumptions that the American spirit has always embodied capitalism’s rough-and-tumble individualism, nineteenth-century Americans were initially horrified by the specter of individual self-seeking and competition run amok that they glimpsed in the new economic system"
Well somebody forget to tell them, as they spent that century outdoing Europe on wages and homesteading their way across a continent to become the #1 global economic powerhouse. Yet she persists in entertaining Arcadian fantasies of "the localized, family-centered barter systems characteristic of precapitalist America" as if Americans were trading beaver skins and paying for things in apples instead of banking (colonial Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the Western world by 1774). I've actually visited a historic preserved 18th century colonial village in upstate NY and the thing that strikes you the most is that they had a local bank printing local money. And what "precapitalist America"? Was there no private ownership in America at some point? Were Americans not "family-centered" in the 19th century? Given the author gets melancholy over the fall and ultimate selling off of her family's silverware business (I guess those egalitarian wage practices weren't so good for the bottom line after all) you can't override the feeling that all this has nothing to do with actual Americans and everything to do with her. Most silly of all is when she drafts Jefferson into this as some Blakean prophet warning us against those dark Satanic mills:
"Jefferson remarked ruefully, “Our enemy … has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from paradise: from a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and a manufacturing one.”
One imagines the owner of 400+ slaves on a 5000 acre plantation carrying on with his teen slave with Oneida-like abandon would have looked down his nose upon industrial farming machinery. As Dr. Johnson said, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"
Even the cult is not exempt, "trapped within quaint bourgeois ideology" as they were. Granted, she says this in the context of Marx, but the half-dozen or so times she summons Marx and Engels throughout the book feel more like a sermon—and not the Oneida kind. By the time the term "heteronormative" makes an appearance you are really beginning to squirm in the pews of this Woke chapel. Kinsey is summoned (predictably) to "prove" that homosexual sex was "common practice among adolescent and adult American males" (Compared to what... Elephantiasis?). These strange revelations of 'common practice homosexual sex among America males' and 'precapitalist America' (Oh for those days when we owned hundreds of acres and people!) are right next to her decrying the opposite in the same breath. Indeed, the entire Cold War is reduced to toxic masculinity gay-bashing those poor Soviets (who had 7000 thermonuclear warheads pointed at us). Who is the proselytizer here, the swinging Oneida cultists or their descendent?
All her editorializing aside, she should be credited with her attention to primary sources on the Oneida commune and her account of the followers' sexual in-fighting is the high point of the book. Still, given this subject, we should be hearing less about Marx and more about Lenin and Chernyshevsky both of whom are not even mentioned. Is the author unaware that in 1863 during the height of Oneida's success as a commune, Russian Nikolay Chernyshevsky wrote a novel about a free love commune that was to profoundly inspire Lenin, Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, and piles of other communists? We get earfuls of Marxism but never once does she mention the free love lifestyle of Marx, Lenin, Rousseau, Shelley, etc and comment on why this attitude is so prevalent among atheistic radical utopian leftists and their radical Christian counterparts like Mormons, Branch Davidians, and the Perfectionists? This book could have been a sexual version of Norman Cohn's classic "The Pursuit of the Millennium" which famously drew comparisons to old utopian millennialist sects like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, flagellants, Anabaptists, and the Ranters to 20th century communists.
Her most glaring error is repeatedly calling the Book of Revelation the "Book of Revelations"—a common error by people who know absolutely nothing about the Bible or Christianity (it is not a book of "revelations" but the actual revelation—as in "revealing"—of Jesus Christ). Not a good look for her or her editors at Picador Macmillan. Had she actually read the Book of Revelation she might have noticed right there in the beginning Jesus singling out two churches for weird sex (the church in Pergamum and Thyatira:
"Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: There are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. 15 Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans.
Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols."
Given that this is about a Christian sect going full swinger club, it might have interested the author to at least mention churches at the dawn of Christianity doing something similar.
Finally, on the subject of incest, the author assures us "the surviving documents provide no evidence that such sister-brother or father-daughter unions were ever consummated at Oneida." Pay attention to that "surviving" part. She devotes an entire chapter later telling us how in 1947 her grandfather and relatives burned an entire "vault full of documents, diaries, letters, and papers dating from the Community days."
If there was ever a case of a writer being too close to their subject, this is it.
"Contrary to popular assumptions that the American spirit has always embodied capitalism’s rough-and-tumble individualism, nineteenth-century Americans were initially horrified by the specter of individual self-seeking and competition run amok that they glimpsed in the new economic system"
Well somebody forget to tell them, as they spent that century outdoing Europe on wages and homesteading their way across a continent to become the #1 global economic powerhouse. Yet she persists in entertaining Arcadian fantasies of "the localized, family-centered barter systems characteristic of precapitalist America" as if Americans were trading beaver skins and paying for things in apples instead of banking (colonial Americans enjoyed the highest standard of living in the Western world by 1774). I've actually visited a historic preserved 18th century colonial village in upstate NY and the thing that strikes you the most is that they had a local bank printing local money. And what "precapitalist America"? Was there no private ownership in America at some point? Were Americans not "family-centered" in the 19th century? Given the author gets melancholy over the fall and ultimate selling off of her family's silverware business (I guess those egalitarian wage practices weren't so good for the bottom line after all) you can't override the feeling that all this has nothing to do with actual Americans and everything to do with her. Most silly of all is when she drafts Jefferson into this as some Blakean prophet warning us against those dark Satanic mills:
"Jefferson remarked ruefully, “Our enemy … has indeed the consolation of Satan on removing our first parents from paradise: from a peaceable and agricultural nation, he makes us a military and a manufacturing one.”
One imagines the owner of 400+ slaves on a 5000 acre plantation carrying on with his teen slave with Oneida-like abandon would have looked down his nose upon industrial farming machinery. As Dr. Johnson said, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"
Even the cult is not exempt, "trapped within quaint bourgeois ideology" as they were. Granted, she says this in the context of Marx, but the half-dozen or so times she summons Marx and Engels throughout the book feel more like a sermon—and not the Oneida kind. By the time the term "heteronormative" makes an appearance you are really beginning to squirm in the pews of this Woke chapel. Kinsey is summoned (predictably) to "prove" that homosexual sex was "common practice among adolescent and adult American males" (Compared to what... Elephantiasis?). These strange revelations of 'common practice homosexual sex among America males' and 'precapitalist America' (Oh for those days when we owned hundreds of acres and people!) are right next to her decrying the opposite in the same breath. Indeed, the entire Cold War is reduced to toxic masculinity gay-bashing those poor Soviets (who had 7000 thermonuclear warheads pointed at us). Who is the proselytizer here, the swinging Oneida cultists or their descendent?
All her editorializing aside, she should be credited with her attention to primary sources on the Oneida commune and her account of the followers' sexual in-fighting is the high point of the book. Still, given this subject, we should be hearing less about Marx and more about Lenin and Chernyshevsky both of whom are not even mentioned. Is the author unaware that in 1863 during the height of Oneida's success as a commune, Russian Nikolay Chernyshevsky wrote a novel about a free love commune that was to profoundly inspire Lenin, Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, and piles of other communists? We get earfuls of Marxism but never once does she mention the free love lifestyle of Marx, Lenin, Rousseau, Shelley, etc and comment on why this attitude is so prevalent among atheistic radical utopian leftists and their radical Christian counterparts like Mormons, Branch Davidians, and the Perfectionists? This book could have been a sexual version of Norman Cohn's classic "The Pursuit of the Millennium" which famously drew comparisons to old utopian millennialist sects like the Brethren of the Free Spirit, flagellants, Anabaptists, and the Ranters to 20th century communists.
Her most glaring error is repeatedly calling the Book of Revelation the "Book of Revelations"—a common error by people who know absolutely nothing about the Bible or Christianity (it is not a book of "revelations" but the actual revelation—as in "revealing"—of Jesus Christ). Not a good look for her or her editors at Picador Macmillan. Had she actually read the Book of Revelation she might have noticed right there in the beginning Jesus singling out two churches for weird sex (the church in Pergamum and Thyatira:
"Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: There are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. 15 Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans.
Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols."
Given that this is about a Christian sect going full swinger club, it might have interested the author to at least mention churches at the dawn of Christianity doing something similar.
Finally, on the subject of incest, the author assures us "the surviving documents provide no evidence that such sister-brother or father-daughter unions were ever consummated at Oneida." Pay attention to that "surviving" part. She devotes an entire chapter later telling us how in 1947 her grandfather and relatives burned an entire "vault full of documents, diaries, letters, and papers dating from the Community days."
If there was ever a case of a writer being too close to their subject, this is it.
December 5, 2018
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.
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.
September 4, 2024
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.
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.
January 1, 2019
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.
February 7, 2017
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.
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.
March 15, 2017
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.
September 15, 2022
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!
August 29, 2024
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.
May 7, 2016
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!
September 2, 2016
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.
June 17, 2016
This book has the details only a family member would have. Incredible details. Interesting history.
October 26, 2016
Excellent, setting the movement in its historical context (more or less -- the Civil War seems to pass over without touching them).
November 13, 2018
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.
“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.
March 29, 2020
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)
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)
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 12, 2026
Utopian communities have always intrigued me, particularly that so many people are willing to follow a delusional cult leader. This is third book I’ve read about the Oneida community (including historical fiction: The Strawberry Fields of Heaven, and non-fiction: Without Sin). The non-fiction account was published in 1993, before Oneida got bought out. This book is from 2016 and was written by a descendant of John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of the community. Talk about interesting ancestors!
Utopian communities in America ranged from the Shakers (no marriage, no sex) to Oneida (no marriage but lots of sex all around). Noyes insisted that the Second Coming and the Millennium was already in the past, having started with the fall of the Temple in A.D. 70. True believers would be so spiritually advanced that they would have no need to “own” another person in marriage, but that they would love ALL their brethren equally. The community built a huge Mansion House in New York where everyone lived together, shared all their resources and all their work – and each other.
Like all other such communities, they could not survive once the founder was gone. When they finally dissolved their experiment, what a complex situation to figure out! You would have one woman with three children by three different fathers, and each of those fathers would have other children by multiple other women. Uncles and nieces and first cousins often had children together, so family trees were a complex bramble. Any woman who couldn’t land a spouse in the rapid competition for marriage and financial support was pretty much doomed to poverty, in addition to being looked at as a fallen woman by the mainstream society.
This book also went into more detail about how the community changed from spiritual communion to industrial communion when they established the profitable Oneida Limited to sell flatware. But still sticking to some of the original principles of the community, workers were paid above market rates that kept pace with the cost of living; created what was essentially a profit-sharing approach; stipulated a maximum on the earnings of management; and when times were bad, hit the salaries of management proportional to the hit on workers. But as the original founders passed on, the usual us/them style of management took over.
Al and I visited the Mansion House at Oneida while driving through New York. The house was divided up into apartments, and some of the residents are descendants of the original members.
Utopian communities in America ranged from the Shakers (no marriage, no sex) to Oneida (no marriage but lots of sex all around). Noyes insisted that the Second Coming and the Millennium was already in the past, having started with the fall of the Temple in A.D. 70. True believers would be so spiritually advanced that they would have no need to “own” another person in marriage, but that they would love ALL their brethren equally. The community built a huge Mansion House in New York where everyone lived together, shared all their resources and all their work – and each other.
Like all other such communities, they could not survive once the founder was gone. When they finally dissolved their experiment, what a complex situation to figure out! You would have one woman with three children by three different fathers, and each of those fathers would have other children by multiple other women. Uncles and nieces and first cousins often had children together, so family trees were a complex bramble. Any woman who couldn’t land a spouse in the rapid competition for marriage and financial support was pretty much doomed to poverty, in addition to being looked at as a fallen woman by the mainstream society.
This book also went into more detail about how the community changed from spiritual communion to industrial communion when they established the profitable Oneida Limited to sell flatware. But still sticking to some of the original principles of the community, workers were paid above market rates that kept pace with the cost of living; created what was essentially a profit-sharing approach; stipulated a maximum on the earnings of management; and when times were bad, hit the salaries of management proportional to the hit on workers. But as the original founders passed on, the usual us/them style of management took over.
Al and I visited the Mansion House at Oneida while driving through New York. The house was divided up into apartments, and some of the residents are descendants of the original members.
April 17, 2025
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.
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