Stuff You Missed in History ClassThis 2019 live show was recorded at the Indiana Historical Society. it covers the two different communal societies of New Harmony, Indiana in the window from 1815-1827.
Happy Saturday. This week, we talked about Narcisse Montreal's submarines, and we mentioned his affiliation with a man named Ettien Cab And there's probably going to be an episode on Etsian Caba in the near future unless something goes very wrong in my research. But Etienkab was also connected to somebody we have talked about on the show before, and that was Robert Owen. We talked about Robert Owen in the later part of our episode on the communal settlements in New Harmony, Indiana, that was part of our live show at the Indiana Historical Society back in twenty nineteen. So this live episode originally came out July thirty first, twenty nineteen. There's also mention of the boatload of knowledge in this live episode. We did do a whole episode on that that came out on August fifth of twenty nineteen.
So enjoy.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson and Tracy we recently went on a little trip we did. We visited the Indiana Historical Society at their invitation, we did a live podcast there. We did that show actually took place the night before their Midwestern Roots Conference began, and it was such an honor to kick off the festivities and they being in Indianapolis, they asked us to do something Indiana related and we ended up talking about the village slash town of New Harmony and a couple of interesting communal living experiments that were conducted there. Yes, we did not get to go to New Harmony while we were there. It was a very fast trip, but there are lots of things about it online. You can have a lot of experience through all of these documents and records and pictures and cool stuff. Yeah, the Indiana Historical Society has a really impressive digital archive online, including things not just about New Harmony, but about a lot of different topics. So we encourage people to absolutely go explore. But for now, we'll hop it right into our live show. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Today we're talking about the town of New Harmony and in the window from eighteen fifteen to eighteen twenty seven, there were two communal society attempts there in the town, one right after the other, one way more successful than the other. But to talk about all that, we actually have to start in the eighteenth century in Germany and talk about George Rapp. George Rapp was born Johann George Rapp on November first, seventeen fifty seven in Iptingen, which is in the Duchy of Wurtemberg, Germany.
And as he was.
Growing up he learned to be a weaver. He got me married to Christina Benzinger in seventeen eighty three, and then they had a son named Johannes, who went more often by John later on, so we talk about John. That's who that is. And they also had a daughter named Rosina. Yeah, unfortunately we don't know a whole lot about Rosina.
I can't imagine why.
Her One of her children shows up a little bit later in the record. We won't talk about her in this podcast, but her offspring becomes a little bit more important to the story. But we really don't know much about their daughter. But by the seventeen eighties Rap had kind of moved away from textiles as a vocation and into his growing religious passion, and he had started preaching. He was Lutheran in terms of his upbringing, but he ended up becoming a Pietist, and in very simplistic terms, that is an ideology that focuses on the individual's religious experience as guided by the Bible, and the movement of Pietism really began out of this perception of shortcomings of the Church and its doctrine and the formality of it and its followers. Pietism's followers really believed that there needed to be reformation within the Church so that they centered theology again on truly living a Christian life and looking to the Bible as the one true authority rather than any sort of hierarchy put together.
By the Church. Yeah.
So, because of this conflict between the established church and his personal beliefs, Rap ultimately separated from the Lutherans in seventeen eighty five, and he didn't go by himself. He had a small group of followers who started meeting at his home, which this was the eighteenth century in Germany that was not legal, and their numbers got bigger over time, even though they were having these illicit religious meetings. By the early seventeen nineties, the little their little gatherings as they had grown, had become very concerning to the church, and the church was worried about this separatist group and the influence they were having, and they considered it to be undermining the social order. And Rapp also believed that he was a prophet, something which he stated openly, and that was essentially a pretty big piece of rebellion against the established Lutheran Church, and he was actually brought before a church commission in seventeen ninety one on charges of heresy, and in his testimony he said to them quite plainly, quote, I am a prophet and I am called to be one. He was imprisoned briefly, so that's how that worked out. But this actually had the opposite of the commission's desired effect. In imprisoning him, more people started to take notice of him, and as a consequence, his followers just grew in number. So in an effort to control this problem, they told rap in seventeen eighty nine that he needed to submit a formal statement of faith, and that instruction didn't actually come from the church, it came from the government of Wurtemberg. Because the church and the state were really deeply interconnected, as was the case in so much of Europe at that point. That was actually one of the things that Rap and his followers really objected to. Yeah, the writing that Rap submitted. He did make his formal declaration, but it was really not what the government or the church was looking for. Rap took advantage of this moment said you want to know what I think, Here's what I think. So he stated quite clearly that while he respected the government, he was very respectful. He was like, I get it. But my followers and I who started calling themselves the Harmonists, you'll also see that mentioned as the Rappites, and we use those two terms pretty interchangeably in this episode. They felt that people should just have freedom to form their own congregations as they wished, without the involvement of any civic body or rules from the government. And additionally, though his statement indicated that the Harmonists really didn't have a whole lot of use for some pretty standard social norms and customs that were part of government and church practice. So they didn't want to be baptized infants because they believed in believer baptism.
Later in life.
They also did not believe in serving in the military, so that was another big problem. You can imagine how that went over Over the next four years, the relationship between the Lutheran government of Wurtemberg and George Ratt just became increasingly tense. And then in eighteen oh three, Rapp was questioned one more time. This time the authorities told him that he was not allowed to speak outside of his town. That seems like an odd instruction, but their thinking was that he had converted everybody that he was going to persuade within the town, so if they could just stop him from going to find new people, it would at least stop the spread of this dangerous rhetoric.
Yeah, it's an interesting it's a solutionisting, but he was so defiant.
They kind of knew he wasn't going to stop now preaching, so they were like, just don't go outside city limits. I feel like those were like rules my parents gave, and don't go outside city limits. We won't pick you up from the jail.
Anywhere but town.
Look, I was a wild child, but this was the end of life in Germany for rap so he set out for the United States. He landed in Philadelphia in October of eighteen oh three, and he had his son John with him as well as two other men who were part of his separatist group, kind of scouting the situation out. So this show is about new Harmony here in Indiana. But the village in Indiana was not the first rap Bite settlement in the United States. And this precursor that they started with was the template that Raptness followers used to establish the Indiana Harmony. So we're going to talk about how it came to be founded and what those rules were, because then they carry over to new harmony here. And the choice of the US for this new settlement was based on raps interpretation of the Bible, the passage in Revelation twelve, which reads quote and the woman fled into the wilderness where she hath a place prepared for God had convinced him that the unsettled land in North America was where he and his followers should make their new home. Rap had hoped that he could either get a land grant from the US government or a provision for the purchase of some discounted land. He did not really understand the process involved. This was well before things like the Homestead Act that made it a lot easier for people to get land Congress had to approve either of those options. Rap did not anticipate that as being part of it, and he wasn't really dissuaded when he found it out. He had been hoping though, that, like even though people were telling him, no, Congress has to do that for you, honey, but he was hoping that he really had something special going on and that he could be given a parcel of land to start his community without having to mess with all that red tape. And so his big idea was that he was going to go straight to President Thomas Jefferson, which he did. He went and spoke with Jefferson on July twelfth of eighteen oh four, and he explained his plans in the situation and what he had come from. And while the President thought this whole conversation was pretty compelling, he also deferred to Congress and he clarified for Rap that that was the only governing body that could.
Grant him land.
Jefferson did, though, use his influence. He wrote some letters so that there would be an offer of land and that offer would be protected. He had give it made sure that Rap had this option to purchase a forty thousand acre township here in Indiana. Rap did not have enough money for that one at the time, so that one did not happen. So part of the reason that Rap was willing to take his request directly to the President was because he needed to get things settled as quickly as possible. He had nothing to send back to Germany. He had nothing to return to there. His estate had been seized by the Wurtemberg government, and he was considered to be a fugitive, so he could not just go.
Back, no, and he didn't want to.
He only had those few people with him when he traveled to North America, but he had already written back to Germany that was like I am never coming back. He didn't want to return to Europe at all. He really thought like he was where God wanted him to be. And he also in those letters spoke about the potential of the US settlement, and as a consequence, more of his followers were already on the way. They were ready to set up this new utopia, and they started arriving in Baltimore aboard the ship Aurora on July fourth of eighteen oh four, and two more groups of Harmonists followed in the next six weeks. Aboard the Atlantic and the Margaretta. So that meant he had an urgent need to have a home for all these new arrivals, and without the assistance that he was hoping for from the US government, so Rap wound up purchasing several thousand acres of land north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in Butler County that cost him a little more than ten thousand dollars, and he had decided that Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, or Maryland would all be good options for where they could set things up, but this particular piece of land was not his first choice of location. Nevertheless, though, the Harmonists pulled all of their resources to try to make a go of it, and they finalized that purchase on December twenty second of eighteen oh four. Not everybody was pleased with this particular Pennsylvania land, though, and some folks did leave Raps group and go strike out on their own. On February fifteenth of eighteen oh five, Rap officially founded the Harmony Society that became the governing body of the town that he founded, Harmony, Pennsylvania, and the society maintained all of their documents in the official language of the society as designated by George Rapp, which was German. He was like, we'll talk about this morn a minute, but like christ is coming, you guys, you don't have to learn another language, where literally, really he was like, don't, let's not waste time with that, Like, just let's keep what we know.
This is going to be more efficient.
He also established himself sort of in this document as the ultimate leader, and when you start looking at biographies of rap and stories about him and how his society worked, he is characterized in two very very different ways. There are some where he is described as this very benevolent and loving father figure, you know, kind of like a hippie love figure that wants to start a cool community everybody, and then in others he's really represented much more as a manipulative dictator who's like, well, I'm going to America because Europe is not going to happen for us.
You'll die if you stay, you should come.
Probably those are two sides of the same coin, and he may have been both of those things depending on who he was dealing with and what topic was at hand, but in all matters, no matter whether they were just the logistics and finances of the community, or matters of faith, or how members of the group would interact with outsiders, including how they voted. Later on, Rapp was deferred to. He made all the decisions and his word was absolutely final. So if you signed on to Harmonies Articles of Association, you relinquished all personal assets to the community and you promised to live by the community's rules. The number of initial members who first signed on with this charter was first established. That estimate varies different accounts site anywhere from thirty one to one hundred families, So that was as many as four hundred to five hundred people. Yeah, some were like tracking by families, some were trying to track by individuals, and I think that leads to some confusion in what those numbers really were. But after that initial charter was established, any new prospective members had to agree to a trial period which is usually like six to eight weeks before they could become full members. And the charter initial included a provision for any members who left the group that were in good standing to be given a sum of cash when they left, so that they were getting a little something back of what they had put in. And also they could start their life elsewhere without having to go from zero. We're going to talk about what happened to that little plan later because it didn't work out so good.
I bet you can get.
So the group quickly set to work. They cleared about one hundred and fifty acres of land in just the first year. They built an estimated fifty log homes, plus a mill, and of course a church. There was also a committee of elders hand chosen by Rap to help lead the adjustment into more communal living. I feel like this is the first place that they really diverge from all the utopian communities that we have ever talked about in that they actually showed up and got some things done. Yeah, and there was a transition team. Like I like the idea that they recognized that these people were all part of a group in Germany, but they weren't accustomed to this idea of life we all lived together in one big community.
And share our resources.
So he did have people that were like, here, we're going to get you through this transition, which is probably why his communities worked better than some others. Two years into this communal living effort, the Harmonists in pace with the second Great Awakening, which was sweeping through the US, had their own reawakening. Beginning in eighteen oh seven, the belief among Rap's followers that Christ was soon to return to Earth took on a much more immediate tone. Rap had come to the conclusion that the Napoleonic Wars, which had started in eighteen oh three, were a sign of the eminent return of the Son of God, and that was because he saw Napoleon Bonaparte as an anti Christ. I said this to Holly while we were planning this episode. But we just got back from Paris not long ago and we saw Napoleon's tomb, and I was unprepared for Napoleon, who you know, we've always learned as a guy that we had a lot of wars with in a giant's tomb surrounded by angel statues. France definitely did not think he was an Antichrist. So Rap thought that this guy's rise to power really signaled the end of Europe in the world order. Yeah, that was one of the many reasons he was like, Europe is not going to exist for long. Come on. Mysticism was also a huge part of the Rapite interpretation of scripture, so George rapp and his followers, but again he was always really leading the ideology, were always watching world events. He was kind of a news junkie, and they were watching events closely to see what they might portend because he was always relating what was going on around them and throughout the world too, what was in the Bible, and trying to kind of parse out any deeper meaning he could. And the group often discussed these matters as part of their religious practice. It basically have like evening services and discussion where they would talk about, Hey, this thing happened over here, this might mean this tying all of these very events, like we said to biblical prophecy. So the Rappites were millennialists. They believed that the Son of God was going to appear once again in human form and then rule the world as his kingdom for a thousand years of peace, and that this was going to start at any moment. So they sought to purify themselves in preparation. So soon there was no tobacco use in harmony, Rap's followers shifted to a celibate life. The end times are coming, you don't need to have any babies prior to this decision. For celibacy. There had been a number of marriages in Harmony, and George's son John had actually been one of the last to get married in Harmony, but even married couples were encouraged to abstain from sexual activity and to live as brothers and sisters of faith. So John rap incidentally clashed with his father during this time. The cartoon that just in my head was like if one of my parents pulled that, and I'd be like a world of no jan and Ron.
This isn't gonna happen.
But yeah, So John and George had some problems and John left Harmony. He moved to Ohio, and he and his father, George later became embroiled in a legal battle over the money that John had contributed to Harmony to the trust, which he wanted back, and several other members that had decided that they were going to leave joined this suit seeking their money as well. All of them after kind of having this drag out for a while because it seemed like they were not in good standing per George's assessment, thus they were not entitled to that, but they eventually abandoned legal action. They just got tired of fighting and they gave up on ever reclaiming their assets. But John did go back and rejoin his father's community, although it was not for terribly long because he died when he was still a very young man in his late twenties, and that happened in eighteen twelve. We will get right back to our New Harmony live show at the Indiana Historical Society in just a moment, but first we're going to pause and have a quick sponsor break. So George Rapp was setting up this whole thing. The idea was that the millennium was coming, and there were naturally gonna be some expenses related to the second coming. Rap knew they might have to travel to New Jerusalem with all of his followers so that they could meet Christ and present themselves, and that was just one for another, there were concerns that there was going to be global instability leading up to this prophesied return that might put them in a position where it would be pretty good to have some ready cash, a little financial liquidity to get through, and the Harmonists also wanted to have money to help support this new world order, so to that end, a fund was started for donations in coin, and that was a fund that Rap managed almost entirely on his own. Uh So, while sexual activity and other pleasures were completely denounced, financial success was aoka seen in a completely different light, the logic being that it could be.
Used in service of faith.
And this is the second way that these folks are totally different from every other utopian experiment we've ever talked about. Like money's cool, gonna have a lot of it. So, even as the Harmonists became more and more settled in Butler County, there were some conflicts that arose. Rapp was really think of thinking of other locations that might be better, and as early as eighteen oh six he was submitting new requests to the government for different land. And one of the things that he and the Harmonists had wanted when they had emigrated from Germany to North America was to cultivate vineyards and orchards, and this Pennsylvania land that they were on was just not working out in that regard, and it was also not in a spot were exporting anything that they did grow could be done at the level that they needed to keep growing. So they were just a little bit too geographically isolated, and he thought they weren't going to continue flourishing if they stayed there. Yeah, that land was near a river, but it was a very shallow river. It was not really like going to support heavy duty irrigation, and they couldn't start shipping things. And additionally, as the area around that settlement grew more populated, the Harmonists found that, for one, their new neighbors really did not understand their community, and they were particularly suspicious of how wealthy the Harmonists seemed to be.
They did not live like poppers.
They had nice things, you know, people that visited would comment on how beautiful everything was and how you know, well appointed the rooms were and stuff. So the Rabbites also had this little problem where they refused to participate in the War of eighteen twelve and they disregarded draft notices. They were fined for it, and they paid those fines, but other pole in the state really started to regard them with a lot of distrust. So in eighteen fourteen they made the decision to head west after Rapid sent a group out to scout for some possible new locations, and the Indiana Territory offered better climate for the crops that they wanted to grow. They could get a bigger piece of land than they had back in Butler County and Harmony, Pennsylvania. The whole thing was sold to a Mennonite named Abraham Ziggler, who paid one hundred thousand dollars for it in eighteen fourteen. Y'all, that's that was ten times more than he bought the land for. Yes, but he had improved it. I feel like we just did history property hunters, but.
I don't like the color.
I don't do you guys watch shows and get frustrated by those people that don't know that paint Israel.
Just paint the room.
It makes me crazy. So in eighteen fifteen, New Harmony, Indiana was officially founded on the Wabash River. As an aside, you will often see this discussed simply as Harmony without the new. That was Rap's intent to just call it Harmony again, but the new got added over time to distinguish between the two locations and in reference to both the first and second settlements. Depending on what document you look at, sometimes Harmony has a Y and sometimes an I e.
Just FYI if you go looking.
So wrap in. The Harmonists put a lot of work to turn this riverfront land, which at that point was unsettled into a village.
They felled trees.
Again and cut them into lumber to use for construction. They dug out clay from the ground to make bricks for the same purpose. It was really arduous work, and first they had to build kind of a pre settlement for everybody to live on. While they were building the larger village, they also established farmland, and they were able to cultivate that vineyard and the fruit crops that they had been wanting the whole time. So Father Rap's home was in the center town and everything kind of radiated out from it. There were four dormitories built adjacent to it, each of which could house sixty to eighty residents. There were also individual homes, and each street had a water well and an oven that were there for communal use. And there were common use plants like herbs that were grown in public spaces and anyone could just come and take them as needed. Of course, there were some difficulties in this move. Malaria was still really common in parts of the US at this point, so malaria and other disease claimed the lives of a significant number of harmonists in that first year, and then in the first years in Indiana, a cemetery had to be established a lot sooner than they were planning to have to deal with these mortalities. And a thing that's super fascinating to me about the cemetery is that it is on the site of native mounds that date back to the Middle Woodland period. So there was like two thousand year old mounds where the cemetery went. Yeah, we don't know what the logicalistic to the best of my knowledge, but as this new community began to grow, rap was pretty smart in that he knew that to survive they needed to diversify, and they wanted to do this so that they could ensure their ongoing financial stability as well. So this was a lesson that they had learned when they were in Pennsylvania, where he eventually saw that the growth and commerce potential of the settlement they had there was.
Finite, and he did not want the same thing to happen again.
So their agricultural efforts were geared not towards subsistence farming where they might sell any extra, but to both providing the food the community needed and having enough produce to sell. They also established mills to process cotton and wool, and again for their clothes, but also they were making enough to trade. These were essentially little factories, and this made Harmony, Indiana prosperous. Yeah, and this prosperity was really in part due to this new location. They weren't in a place that was heavily populated when they got there. This was essentially frontierland, which the US had gained possession of in the eighteen oh four Treaty of Vincennes, which read, in part, the said Delaware Tribe for the considerations here and after mentioned relinquishes to United States forever all their right and the title to the tract of country which lies between the Ohio and Wabash rivers and below the tracks seated by the Treaty of Fort Wayne and the road leading from Vincenz to the Falls of Ohio. So this, of course was all part of the larger series of treaties that affected this whole part of the US to let the government take land that had been previously inhabited by native peoples, which also continued long after we're talking about today. So this is all sort of going on at the same time as all the stuff that we're talking about. Yeah, So the nearest town at this point was more than thirty miles away, so there was not a lot of competition for traveler business when people moved through the area and might need a trade or purchase supplies to get them ready to keep going wherever they were headed. And additionally, the settlement was right there the river, so they started shipping their manufactured goods from that point of departure, establishing a very wide reaching retail business. All run on a communal model where everyone contributed. So while the men generally saw to the agricultural efforts, the women and children worked in the mills and workshops producing dry goods. So they had gotten to Indiana in eighteen fourteen, and that meant that the Rappites were really setting up their home and their business settlement at the same time that Indiana was transitioning to statehood. It became the nineteenth US state at the end of eighteen sixteen, so the residents of Harmony were basically able to get into the ground floor, so to speak, of this new state economy. In addition to the fruits and the vegetables that they were growing and selling, the town's general store had clothing and shoes. Cold cold weather gear, saddles and bridles, and plows and wagons, anything else that somebody might need.
Yeah, it was pioneer target one hundred percent.
And people went in they only needed shoes, but they came out with like so much stuff. They had somebody following you around, like do you need a cart? Do you need a No, I don't need a cart. If you give me a cart, I'm buying everything.
Yeah.
But the town also produced beer, wine, and whiskey, which could be purchased at the general store, or you could enjoy it in the town tavern, which they had also built. Harmonists were not anti alcohol, but they were very much anti drunkenness. The whiskey that they produced, for example, was not something any of them drank. It was for other people. They occasionally had wine, but the rest of the alcoholic beverages that they produced were strictly commercial. The Harmonists of the town could just ask for anything that they needed without paying for it, because their participation in the community entitled them to it. But really, at least in terms of food, there wasn't a whole lot that the Harmonist households needed at the general store. As part of the establishment of the community. Every home was set up to have its own gardens. There poultry and a cow for each household, and as we mentioned, there were also public access gardens near the dormitories. But outsiders, of course coming through you had to pay, and on occasion those outsiders found the prices a little bit high, and they were kind of resentful that not everybody had to pay for stuff. The idea of communal living in this way was completely alien, and they sometimes felt like they were being treated poorly. Additionally, people certainly noticed that while the harmonists were perfectly happy to sell hard liquor, they were not willing to drink it, and this led to some interesting discord because there were customers, like in the tavern that kind of just felt like they were being judged, like I'm going to sit here and have a whiskey and there would just be people staring at them, just not how I enjoy a vodka, so I understand. So all this commerce was largely the work of Frederick Reiker Rap, which was George George Rap's adopted son. George had understood the need for diversification, but it was really Frederick who managed all these various enterprises that was making the community really profitable. The profits were used to purchase additional land and expanding new Harmonies footprint and enabling more crops to be planted for future commerce. Frederick was Wrapp's right hand in all these business dealings, and it had been Frederick who had stayed behind in Harmony of Pennsylvania to wrap up the business affairs there after George had moved on and Indiana. He was in charge of both the commerce and the political rate relationships with outsiders. Yeah, so when county officials had asked rap to send a representative from his group to the state constitutional Convention in eighteen sixteen, it was naturally Frederick who was chosen. This was also in part because Frederick was one of the few people who had learned a bit of English truly, so he could go. His English was allegedly not fantastic, but he could get along, and he was assigned interestingly enough for a pacifist group to the committee that drafted section of the constitution that related to the militia. This actually really worked out, though, because it was due to his influence that wording was included at that point to allow conscientious objection to the bearing of arms with a provision to pay a fee for exclusion from the draft, and just as had been the case in Pennsylvania, the refusal of the Rappites to participate in military service kind of rankled their neighboring communities. Around the same time, New Harmony was growing pretty rapidly, and they needed more able bodies to run all these manufacturing enterprises, and to meet that demand, the requirements of religious devotions started relaxing a little bit. Frederick Rapp was appointed as one of the commissioners of the State Bank of Indiana, and this shift of focus to commerce was particularly upsetting for a number of the Harmonists. Their society had been founded entirely on their faith, with their commercial interests always framed as being necessary to sup that faith, but now it seemed less and less like that was the case. There was an ebb and flow in New Harmony's population in the late eighteen teens that the number of people left. New immigrants arrived from Germany and replaced them, but the acceptance of new members turned out to be completely unsuccessful. Rapp later wrote that the newcomers were quote too wild for our congregation, and that he was and this is a quote sick and tired of them, and he had actually been paying for the passage from Germany for some people who had written and said that they wanted to join the community, but he put an end to that practice. He also stopped the existing members of the community from writing home to Germany being like the US is great, you guys, because people were saying like, I have found a better life here. You can come and you know, to family members and friends, you could come and be part of this, and he was like, please stop doing that. We can't can't do that. He wanted people of faith, and most importantly, people so fit that they would obey him in whatever he said, and he just could not trust any newcomers to live up to his high standard of what exactly that meant. So even for the new members who were devout enough for George Rap's taste, it just wasn't easy. Members who had been with the Harmonists since eighteen oh five were pretty judgmental of the newer members, and factions started to form of the old and new groups. In eighteen eighteen, George Rapp revised those articles that had been established thirteen years prior when the Pennsylvania Settlement began in an effort to address the destabilization that was taking place, and two major changes came from this revision. So First, all records of how much any given person had contributed to the community upon their entry into it were destroyed. The intent was that the old and the new factions would stop bickering about who was more valuable to the community and who had given more and deserved more. Second, that provision for those choosing to leave to get a cash upon their exit was stricken from the charter because as people were wanting to leave, he was recognizing that he couldn't just keep giving bushels of money away. So at the same time as these internal issues were plaguing New Harmony, there was also mountain friction with their neighbors. At this point, immigrants who'd been in the US for a while and the first generation of European descendants to be born on US soil started to view immigrants new immigrants as potentially destructive to what they had built. Little ironic Yeah, and Rap's community had a number of things working against it as this settlement grew. So for one thing, or as this sentiment grew rather, I'm sorry for one thing, it was self isolating, so most of the members still only spoke German. They refused to bear arms, and that group was wealthy enough to pay the penalty required to exempt them from military service, whereas most people could not have afford it. They also commanded just a huge chunk of the area's financial capital, and they seemed impervious to the various shifts in the market that negatively impacted the communities around them. And they weren't having children, so they weren't helping to build the US population, just as had been the case back in Pennsylvania. Rap and the Harmonists were facing increasing resentment from the locals and dealing with their own fractures within the commune, so they decided to leave. They left all their hard work in New Harmony, Indiana, to start all over again. Raps still believed that the second coming was eminence. He wanted to regroup, reset the community with the focus of preparing for that, And in the decade that they spent here in Indiana, Rap and his people had really built something considerable. So they had not only raised such varied crops as sugarcane, wheat, hemp, cotton, and flax, among others, they had also built that general store, and in various specialty shops, textile mills, tanneries, and distilleries. They were producing three thousand gallons of whiskey for sale each year and harvesting thousands of bushels of things like potatoes, rye, and oats. And they had started importing sheep from Spain to make fine woolens, and they were able to get into a textile market that previously had only included wool fabric that was imported from Europe. But then in eighteen twenty four, New Harmony was sold to a man named Robert Owen for another selling of an entire town in this story, and the Harmonists left Indiana. Okay, So before we get into the next phase of New Harmony's history, we are going to take another little break and hear from one of the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. Robert Owen was born on May fourteenth of seventeen seventy one in Newtown, Montgomery, share Wales. I have probably said that incorrect for the Welsh people. His parents, Robert Owen and Anne Williams, had six other children in addition to Robert, and as a child, Owen moved to London and he became a clothe year's apprentice at the age of ten, and in that job he had access to his employer's vast library of books, which he loved. He also really excelled in the textile industry, and before age twenty he was already running a large Manchester cotton mill that went on to great success under his leadership. And through his success he started making little efforts into the idea of communal living, and his first such work started when he convinced his bosses to purchase some mills in the Scottish village of New Lanark, which was a really impoverished community, and Robert Owen wanted to improve the quality of life for everyone in New Lanark, so he worked on initiatives to make the housing there safer and cleaner, and to educate the children in the area as well as the adults, and he was mindful of the welfare of the workers in the mills he managed. When the mills closed for several months during the War of eighteen twelve, he actually made sure that the workers continued to get paid during that time. Naturally, things like this really endeared him to the people he employed, but his business partners not so much. Disagreements over this led Robert Owen to breaking from his established job and starting his own company in eighteen thirteen. The stockholders and his new adventure were pretty like minded. They were content to take a smaller share of the profits so that the money that was made could be put toward benevolent projects, and soon they bought out his old partners. Yeah, and one of the drivers in Owens's work was actually his attitude toward religion. He thought that all established religions were really problematic, and he thought that people's circumstances had greater influence over their behavior and their lives than any church ever could, and so he thought that if everyone's circumstances were improved, the world would just become a better place. And he was working to make New Lanark an example of how that ideology worked. And as a consequence, the village, which is pretty successful in his efforts, was visited and studied by everyone from royals to philosophers. He kept working on bettering the lives of people in the village, particularly the children, and he wanted to extend that beyond the town. He lobbied among manufacturers to reduce the number of hours that children worked that was initially voted down. He also opened Great Britain's first kindergarten in New Lanark in eighteen sixteen, called the Institution for the Formation of Character. And all of this was really like a slow burned build up to lead o into the idea of communal living. And he thought particularly that if unemployed workers displaced by machinery in the Industrial Revolution just had safety and security and a reasonable standard of living, a lot of the world's ills would be cured. Like he saw it as a pretty obvious chain of events, like people are without work, they don't have money, they turned to crime, or they just fall on hard times and they suffer, and we could prevent all of that. He envisioned these villages that were designed for this idea, where family oriented dormitories existed, that had commonery areas where people could cook and socialize, and children would stay with their parents the first three years, but then be raised by the collective and then everyone would work as they were able to keep the whole thing going, including agricultural work to provide food. So Owen had actually made contact with New Harmony four years before he took possession of it. He had written to George rap with this series of questions about how the rapp Bite Utopia was functioning. He had done that in eighteen twenty as his ideas of these communities to prevent poperism were forming in his head. So when George Raps Harmonists were ready to sell, Owen was ready to buy. And he already knew that the Harmonist village had been profitable after writing a number of essays about how communal society could succeed, he was ready to take possession of this whole town and prove it. And additionally, he his own problems that were making it pretty appealing to leave home and.
Strike out in a new place.
His outspoken anti religion stance had really strained relationships with his business partners as well as his wife, who was very religiously devout. I can't imagine that marriage. And his work in New Lanard was actually hitting some problems as well. There had been a typhoid outbreak, which was really kind of scandalous for a town that was touted as having impeccable cleanliness, and there was a dispute over pay rates that was brewing. And part of the problem was that as Owen had gotten more and more obsessed with creating a new utopia. He had grown more and more distant from that company town that was his first experiment in socialized society. Owen paid one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars for New Harmony, and that purchase was final in early January of eighteen twenty five. Robert Owen was really eager to get to work. Five of his children, which included four sons and a daughter, traveled to Indiana to help their fought and as spring arrived, Owen offered a life in the community to anyone who cared to join and then embrace its ideals of equality and communal living.
Yep, open invitation. That sounds smart. What could go wrong?
Also, we're going to return to the ideas of equality in a minute.
Yeah, not so much so.
His new town had come with one hundred and eighty buildings, but they were pretty quickly kind of packed to the guilds because a lot of people wanted in on this opportunity. But almost from the beginning things went wrong. For one, Owen continually bad mouthed established religion, which made a lot of the newcomers really uneasy. He was a dedicated follower of Enlightenment thinking, and he wanted to eschew tradition in favor of forging all new paths, which was another unpopular position that made people a little nervous. And he tended to appeal to the upper class for financing and support, and he misjudged the willingness of the US upper classes to participate in such an experiment tarticularly an experiment like this that had no ties whatsoever to religion.
And spoke openly against it.
In fact, he did find some help in the form of William McClure, who was a Scottish born merchant who also believed in social reform and ultimately did invest heavily in New Harmony. McClure offered his own funds to the development of New Harmonies schools and engaged some of the most respected educators of the day to teach there. I mean, the schools had a really amazing reputation. McClure also paid for the school's labs to have scientific equipment and other necessities. Yeah, I feel like there could be a whole side show just about the people that he brought. We don't talk about it nearly enough in this one because it's about the whole whole story, but there were some great people doing cool things. Owen had created a foundation document called Rules for a Good Community in nineteen twenty five that outlined what he thought was necessary to create inequality based society. Incidentally, our lovely hosts have this digitized online as well as many many other fabulous documents that are really really were really helpful to me and doing research for this, but also just are fascinating to look through. So Owen's is Owen's. I keep wanting to put an s on his name. He's just Owen. Owen's Rules were pretty lengthy, but they set up some very important ideas, including the fact that the financial accounts of the community should be maintained by a chosen treasurer who reported to a committee on all transactions, and that all of those financial records needed to be open for anyone in the community to go and.
Review if they wanted to.
Robert Owen's Rules also set up different departments to manage things like manufacture, policing, health, and education.
Things like that these.
Divisions would be run by subcommittees skillful practical men from the community with expertise in any of these areas could be engaged by the appropriate sub committee for assistance. But really, despite all these plans, Owen's utopia was a lot harder he found to execute in reality than it had been on paper. For one, even though it was going to be a society of equals, there were some pretty clear class distinctions. Wealthy people had moved there due to the draw of this life among the intelligentsia, and working people had moved there for a chance to have a better life, and everybody thought it was going to be equal, but the reality was that those two groups rarely mixed. They kind of chose instead to self segregate along wealth lines. There wasn't a relinquishing of personal wealth in Owen's group like there had been in Wraps, so this class structure had just followed everyone into new harmony. The working class was resentful of wealthier inhabitants and ability to contribute to the labor that was needed to sustain such a place. No structure was ever fully implemented. The community couldn't really become self sufficient, so the group was floundering, while Owen was continuing to put his own money into trying to keep it afloat.
Even on uneven footing.
I feel like we should mention that there were some efforts really to make new harmony into a community. Owen's children, in particular, did a lot of things. His son William started a Thespian Society so that they could have arts and people could go see plays whenever they wished. The school system is really what flourished though children had both academic curriculum and training in trades. But ultimately, when it came down to it and things really were obviously not going to work out, Owen blamed McClure and the educational setup for tanking the community. Owen gave one last address to the community on May sixth of eighteen twenty seven, and in it he said that McClure system only reinforced class distinctions instead of erasing him. There had been some debate over whether he was favoring children that were from wealthier families with better opportunities. Owen also thought there was too much creativity in the curriculum and not enough morality education, and he basically told everyone his school ideas had been superior to McClure's and if they had just done it had his way, they could have sustained the town. Long story Bless his heart. Long story short, this did not go all that well. By the time Robert Owen decided to end his involvement in this utopian dream, he had lost eighty percent of his personal fortune. He went on to participate, but in a much less central way and other utopian experiments, but he eventually focused a lot more on activism and the establishment of trade unions. Yeah, he really became like a labor activist, which kind of seemed like it should have been his thing from the get go, but he learned a lot in the process. If you are wondering what happened to the Rappites and their leader after they left Indiana, they moved as planned and started a new settlement, returning to Pennsylvania to do it. That new home was called Economy, and it was where George Rapp lived out the rest of his life. And just as they had grown New Harmony into a massive and profitable enterprise, Economy had investments in railroads and the oil industry, and their export business reached dozens of states and ten countries. So they just kept on going with that money thing. This fascinates me because so often the story is and then they ran out of money and everyone got sick and moved away. Even though they were very financially successful, it was not entirely smooth. Rap and his adopted son, Frederick, who he had relied on so heavily since the beginning of the Harmonist time in the United States, started to have disagreements about planning for the financial future of the community. That caused a lot of fracturing within the group and a lot of tension. Yeah, when they started to think about like there was also this problem where people were realizing, like.
What about Christmas here yet y'all.
We're not having kids and we're getting older and there's some problems. Like they started to realize this was not working out. Rap died in eighteen forty seven at the age of eighty nine. And remember that collection fun that he started the early years of his community because they wanted to have funds so they could deal with travel needs to Jerusalem and any chaos that ensued. When he died, he had amassed half a million dollars that he kept an a vault under his bedroom. He had withdrawn all of the Harmonists money from banks because he feared a banking collapse. So he was just literally sitting on top of a pile of money. I feel like that that wasn't an unjustified fear. But at the same time, that's a lot of money to have in a vault.
Under your bedroom. Yeah, I would dig it.
Yeah. The Rappike community continued, but without its charismatic leader, it couldn't really sustain things long term. Soon members of the group were questioning some of those things they had agreed to, in particular that celibacy situation. That also meant that they hadn't expanded their community by starting families, and without Wrap driving that whole ideology, they also weren't bringing in new members, so just the math was not in their favor long term. In the twenty years after rap died, the group shrank down to about two hundred and fifty members, and from there it continued to diminish right up until the dawn of the twentieth century. In nineteen oh three, the town of Economy was sold by a representative of the remaining Rapites for several million dollars. In nineteen oh five, the US Supreme Court issued judgments on the last of the disputed Rapite assets at Economy, and within a year the Harmonist movement was completely a matter of history. As for the people who had landed in the failed utopia of Robert Owen, one particular aspect of their efforts really did take hold and survived. The educators that McClure had brought in called the Boatloaders because the ship most of them traveled on to the United States had been nicknamed the Boatload of Knowledge, which I love. They I think that's a good T shirt. We should do that load of Knowledge shirt is a good one.
They stayed.
They created enclave of science and education that persisted for long after Owen was gone.
Yeah.
McClure, as you guys probably know because you're you live near here, was really known for his knowledge of geology, and he really started some interesting stuff in New Harmony in terms of like teaching geology and establishing labs there, and a pretty long tale for him of his legacy. As a consequence, in nineteen sixty five, New Harmony became a National Historic District. Many sections of the town have been restored to their Rappite era versions, and the village's famous hedge labyrinth was restored in nineteen forty, much to the to the delight and sometimes confusion of tourists who choose to enter, as so as people who go visit. That's I have not gotten to go to New Harmony. That's the one thing I want to see. I will get lost in that labyrinth and maybe never come out. But that is our New Harmony tale for the day. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
