The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 6 May 2010
by Sterling F. Delano
We tend to think that the lifestyle experiments of the 1960s were a kind of anomaly, that they took our culture out of itself for a while, but that we've basically returned to normal. Rebelling against the counterculture movements of the sixties has been a central issue for American conservatives for the past three decades. In reality, though, cultural experimentation, breaking the rules of our social expectations, has a long history in America. It is a fundamental part of our social history and stretches back to the beginning, when the communities that came to this continent were often the suppressed countercultural experiments of their day back in the old countries.
One of the notable examples of this history is Brook Farm, a communal farm and school founded by Trancendentalists near Boston in 1841. George Ripley, a Boston Unitarian minister, gave up his pulpit to pursue a kind of Christian social justice, with forward-thinking theories of labor and gender equality, women's rights, and communities based on work, education, and spiritual fulfillment. He was associated with the more famous Trancendentalists of his day, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller. Relying on their material and spiritual support, he built a community on a small farm, eventually joined by more than a hundred seekers, including such notables as Nathaniel Hawthorne (who later wrote a fictional account of Brook Farm in The Blithedale Romance). In the event, though, Ripley didn't garner much in the way of material support. The Trancendentalists were uncomfortable with his determination to maintain a community free of specific religious requirements. From the very start, the Farm suffered from financial difficulties. Indeed, if we turn to the subtitle of this book, the dark side of Utopia appears to be money, the lack of it, and the need of it to survive in the larger world. Page after page of Delano's account relates the perpetual struggle of Brook Farm with the financing of their experiment. Ripley engaged in a rash building program that was never fully paid for. Investors pledged money, but never delivered. Hawthorne eventually sued Brook Farm for a return on his investment and never recovered much. Various plans and disasters conspired against the financial success of the community. In a desperate attempt to gain the support of the larger Associationist movement of the time, based partly upon the ideas of French social reformer Charles Fourier, Ripley converted the farm into an industrial phalanx, an almost mechanical social construction that was being tried widely around the country, with varying success. This turned off some of the Farm's founding members. And still, for reasons that aren't entirely clear but perhaps based on ideology and personality, publicity-conscious New York Fourierists never fully supported Brook Farm. The experiment eventually withered and died. The land on which it stood remains a park in West Roxbury, southwest of Boston.
Delano hammers home the desperate financial straits of the Farm. It is his primary focus. His portrayal is relentless and convincing. We gain a vivid portrait of the difficulties Ripley and other Brook Farmers faced when trying a social experiment entirely new. Many of its lessons echo in the history of the communal experiments of the 1960s. And many of the cultural critiques of the time are extremely pertinent even in the 21st century. This is a fundamentally practical history, though. Delano portrays many of the characters who lived at the Farm, or who were associated with it, but not in terribly deep detail. Throughout most of the book, the reader wonders, in the face of all this financial struggle, what was it that the Brook Farmers actually gained from the experience? We can see what drew them to the Farm, but what was it that kept them there? We look for the social intrigues (perhaps best found in Hawthorne's novel), the relationships and even the scandals, those parts of the life that make the story most human. Delano admits that the documentary evidence isn't terribly strong (except perhaps for the letters and diaries of Mary Ann Dwight). And, late in the book, he reflects on the idealism and the basic success that Brook Farm represented, despite its practical failures. It did endure for several years. Longer than some such experiments (Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands famously lasted only months), but not as long as others. It did realize some basic goals of equality for women. If Delano speculates on the numerous failures of the community, he just touches on its successes. Overall, the book is dense, clearly written, and evocative of the time, 170 years ago, when the nation engaged in some revolutionary social experiments. The 1840s were like the 1960s before the Civil War. What a time it must have been.
See Also: [Books of the Counterculture and the 1960s]