Happy Saturday, everybody. We recently got an email from listener Ellen who asked us to do a show about the onidat Utopia, and that's one that's already in our archive from back in tleven from our previous hosts Sarah and Babuina. One of the things that's really strongly associated with the Anida community was free love and complex marriages. And that means that there is a little more sex talk, in a little more candid sex talk in today's show than you might typically associate with us. It might even be a lot more so Happy listening, Welcome to Stuff you missed in history Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuckerboarding, and today we're gonna talk a little bit more about free love. I mean, hopefully that makes you keep on listening right away. But I was thinking about it because we did a podcast a couple of weeks ago on Victoria wood Hall, who was the first female presidential candidate. And I don't know if you want to give a quick recap of her beliefs on free love. Yeah, she basically didn't believe free in free love in the sense that everyone should be having sex with each other. But she did believe that people should have the choice whether or not to be together. So that was just a little bit about it. You didn't have to be stuck in a marriage if you didn't want to be. Now, So we we had her on our minds. And then also I co edited an article recently that Molly Edmonds wrote one of the hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told You on polyamory, and so it came up again, and she actually even mentioned the Oneida Community in her article. So both of those examples got me thinking about this community, which is probably the most famous example of organized free love in American history, and it is, of course the Oneida Commune or Oneida Community in New York State. Yeah, when I first started researching this with you, it seemed almost too crazy to be real. I don't know, Maybe I've just lived too sheltered a life. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I don't know. Can you tell us a little bit about some of these things? It does sound too crazy to be real, And that's partly because the people that made up this large Victorian community shared not only property and labor, but of course sexual partners, and they surprisingly earned boatloads of money through these really successful marketing schemes. I think that's sort of the first loop in this In this episode, they were actually quite successful financially. Another potentially strange fact about them they regarded the genders equally and they shared labor, so pretty surprising. The ladies even more pantaloons. You can look up pictures of them. They have short skirts and little pantaloons underneath. And um. Then, maybe the strangest thing of all. Their eventual undoing came about when this eugenics inspired breeding pro Graham left the younger members yearning for good old fashioned courtly love and and monogamous marriage. And for those of you who own some fine Oneida silver, you might know where it goes from there. The commune doesn't last forever, much like a lot of other communes, even those that are often considered to be the most successful in American history, like Oneida. So who was behind this Oneida community in the first place. This guy named John Humphrey. Noise and it's not doesn't look like noise. It's n O y E s. In case you want to look up this guy a little more. But yeah, the commune and the ideas behind it came from his ideas and preaching. And he was born in eighteen eleven in Vermont. He was a wealthy kid. He went to Dartmouth and then to law school. Really seemed to be on the right track to being a well off New England lawyer until he attends a revival of evangelist Charles Finney in eighteen thirty one, and at that point he decides to become a minister instead, so big career change. But but even then he seems like he was possibly on the track to becoming just a well off New England minister instead of a lawyer. He went to Andover Theological Seminary. From there he transferred to Yale. But after that his ideas started to get kind of out there, and definitely two out there. For Yale, he believed in something called perfectionism, which was the idea that after conversion we are free from sin, which obviously that idea didn't sit very well with the Calvinist faculty at Yale and they denied his ordination. Yeah, so just to give you a little background on the beliefs that he had. They extend from the central idea of Perfectionism, and they're pretty controversial. He, for one thing, thinks the Second Coming has come and gone already. In fact, he thinks that happened in a d seventy at the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. This meant that man didn't have to wait for heaven to be one with God. You could do it here on earth as well. But to do so you had to leave the world and live according to the laws of heaven, like maybe in a commune run by noise. So he gets kicked out of Yale, and he starts kind of meeting with other perfectionists, learning the drill, talking to people going on the circuit, and he decides, well, I'm going to start my own group here, and he organizes the Bible Communists in Putney, Vermont, in eighteen thirty six and preaches love and harmony to them. And it's interesting to sort of get a look at what type of people were joining this group, the Bible Communists. They were mostly small town folks. They came from all sorts of occupation, something that probably proved useful down the line, and you know, maybe if it had stayed at this level, it would have been pretty under the radar. You know, a religious group that's too radical for Gale, but not so radical that it doesn't fit in in some way with all of the revivals sweeping the United States at this time, then Noise shakes things up a little bit. Yeah, he doesn't just keep it at that level. Just a year after starting that group, Noise writes the so called battle Axe Letter. And this letter it really gets the public riled up. It stirs up a lot of controversy because it advocates free love. Specifically, it says, quote, when the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, there will be no marriage. And his rationale came from scripture. It came from Matthew, which says for in the Resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. So Noise took this to mean that marriage should not be exclusive. All men should be married to all women and it's something called complex marriage. So this is definitely an example of free love that's different from the one we talked about in the Victoria Woodhole episode. Quite different in fact, but the idea, just like Victoria Woodhell made Noise in his followers incredibly in its corious and when they actually start practicing complex marriage by eighteen forty six, which is a little bit after they decide that they're going to share all their property and all their belongings, it does not sit well with their neighbors in Putney, Vermont, not at all. And Noise is arrested for adultery because he is married legally, and he jumps bail, and by eighteen forty eight he and most of his followers DeCamp for Oneida, New York. And there are a few other satellite communities, but the main Oneada community is set up there in New York and it lasts for another thirty years. So we're gonna talk more about free love and that aspect of the community later, but first, it's interesting to figure out how these perfectionists Biblical communists actually made a living. Yeah, well, at first they don't write the two hundred people that live in this community. They try farming and logging. It's a situation where men and women are sharing the same rights and lay bur but the community isn't doing well enough to support itself for the long term. So then things start picking up eventually, though when they start manufacturing things again into manufacturing work a little more reliable. Yeah, So what sorts of things were they manufacturing. They were canning and jarring veggies and fruit, also processing silk and printing. They were milling grist mills and sawmills both and making small goods like traveling bags. Yeah, and there. That was all pretty successful for them. But the big win, the thing that really made them sustainable, was the invention of one of the community's members, a guy named Suel new House, and he came up with a new kind of lightweight animal trap for for animals, and the trap market at the time was not so crowded that you couldn't have a new a new trap birth through and so by the mid eighteen fifties, they were making so many of these traps, and they were selling them so well that they had to hire on wade workers, which was kind of at odds with their belief because they were not only against slavery, they were also against wage labor, and especially seasonal wage labor, because at this point people would work, they'd have jobs during the summer, and then they'd get laid off in the winter, especially in a place like New York where there were pretty heavy winters, so here they were doing it themselves, you know, hiring seasonally to make these traps. But they did create many things. I mean, I think we all know some of the results of their inventiveness, for example, the Victor mouse trap and the Lazy Susan. I was so excited to learn that they were responsible for this. It's made such a difference in my life. Excellent piece of trivia, I think. Well, And the interesting thing about the Lazy season Um, one of the important things in the community was that mediocracy was key. You were never supposed to be lazy, but you weren't supposed to try to strive above all the others. And I think it's maybe a little funny that the Lazy Susan is the result of that, a convenience product at least. But even though some inventions did stand out and some adventures did stand out in this community community, that word was still definitely the key. Even labor was social. They would hold these bees to complete tasks in a timely manner um. And maybe you can talk about the bees a little more, Sarah, Yeah, I mean probably most people are maybe familiar with quilting bees, that kind of thing where everybody gets together and you make all the quilts. You know, you have the tops piece together already, but you go ahead and do the more boring work, which is is attaching it to the bottom and putting in the padding and everything. But they wouldn't do this just for quilts. They would do it for any kind of task that needed to be accomplished quickly. So for instance, like bringing in the hay it's something you better do before it rains heavily, or making these bags. You know, they'd all get together. And the interesting thing about it is, like you mentioned earlier, they really did emphasize the community aspect. It was something that was supposed to be fun, not just boring work if you're doing it yourself. And there's even a quote from their second annual report where they wrote that the task could be done quote at a single stroke with all the enthusiastic, sportive feeling of a game of ball. That does sound rather exciting, but it does beg the question also, if a hayin bee is as fun as a game of ball, then what is downtime like in this community? And again we see that it's really communal. The adults live in what is called the mansion house, which was a three story modern home complete with shared dining and living spaces. It's a pretty handsome home actually still stands. Yeah, and it's interesting. One of the perks of living in Oneida meant that because of scale, the community could afford some things that other people couldn't. They could afford luxuries like um furnaces and heated drawing rooms, things that only wealthy people could afford at the time. Yeah, because it is a mansion house, it just has a lot of people living in it. So we're going to take you on a little tour of the home. Um, starting in the dining room, which could hold the entire community. And I think this is a really interesting thing they did to to ensure that clicks wouldn't pop up in the dining room as they always do, right, Yeah, the typical Yeah, you would take your seat by your place in the serving line, so I guess you could maybe jump the line to be with your friend, but you would essentially be seated at random, so so no favorites. After dinner. After dinner with with any of your random community members, you would move on to the big hall and have a meeting. And the hall is sort of the center of the religious aspect of this community too, But it doesn't look at all like a church. It had paintings of justice and music and astronomy and history, allegorical paintings, and it's also where members would discuss their spiritual concerns and talk about community concerns and then maybe relax a little too and enjoy a concert. I think the community kept a band among its members or some other kind of entertainment, and it's quite the program. And if that program on any given night was promising enough, maybe some tourists would stop by pay about twenty five cents for an evening of grand entertainment. So they build it. Yeah, but the gatherings in the big hall, they weren't always that fun. So, for instance, you wouldn't want to show up on a night where they were doing quote mutual criticism, and on those nights that's when everyone could basically air their grievances with everyone else. Reminds me kind of a festivus, not to make a comparison with a fake religion, but um, the mutual criticism part is one of the strangest aspects of this to me, that you would go face to face with these people who you lived with and worked with every day, and tell them what was wrong, which could be not only you're not working hard enough to support the community, but you're working too hard. You're going above and beyond, and it's it's not you don't fit in. Yeah. It goes back to that goal of mediocrity that you mentioned before. So after getting some of these neighborly criticisms off your chest, you might go on up to the upper sitting Room, which was a well appointed salon where you could page through some books like Charles Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drewd, which I think you read recently. I read the spin off. You read the spin off. Sorry, my mistake. They wouldn't have read the spin off, probably not quite, but they might have also read some bound copies of magazines like Atlantic Monthly. Anyway, just your basic chill out space, take some time off after the hanging, Yeah, and then it's off to bed in your private room with a twin bed. Yeah. And here's the kicker there. You would definitely be by yourself when you we're going off to bed. And this brings us to the complex marriage which he knew we were going to have to talk about. Eventually, it's what made the Onida community so infamous, and Noise believed that for the community to live without sin, they would need to quote mail marriage to the cross. So he was against monogamous marriage, but he wasn't against sex. He was actually quite in favor of it as long as it took place between multiple partners. But he knew that there was a potential problem with that, and that was that complex marriage would soon produce a whole lot of kids, more kids than the community could support. So he instituted this practice that he himself had begun after his wife had suffered from four premature births and death, and it was he called it male continents, and it was basically male birth control UM. He decided to do it himself after her after her premature births UM. She was quite understandably distraught over the death of those four kids, and he decided that she shouldn't have to go through it again. But he actually turns it into part of his philosophy after that. It's not just something that happened personally to him. He takes it and makes it part of the community. So he separates sex into two components. Essentially, the pleasurable aspect of it and the reproductive aspect and treats them into entirely different ways. So, since Adam and Eveson, the reproductive part had been dominant, but by taking the reproductive aspect out of the picture, people would be free to indulge in the more pleasurable part. So this is how he saw it. Yeah, and this male continence idea that he comes up with really does work pretty well for the community as far as limiting the number of children born, because between eighteen forty eight and eighteen sixty nine only thirty one kids are born. And we're going to talk a little bit more about kids in the community later, But after they were weaned, they were raised communally in this children's house by guardians. But there aren't just rules about how people were supposed to have sex and not reproduced. There were also rules about how the matchups even were made. Yeah, And the main thing about these rules is that there were no secrets, right. That was the essential component here. For example, if you had sex with someone, it wasn't even happening in a private room. Instead, you would go to these small trysting rooms, is how they were known. I think right off of the upper sitting room, and you could essentially book a room for a few hours, but everybody knew about it when you did. It seems so awkward to they are right off the room. I think one that is still in existence as a as a show piece really is right off the sitting room where everyone is hanging out. But really everyone already knew who was matched up anyways, because couples had to be approved by the Central Guidance Committee, which was made of course of Noise and his family and other elders. And they not only approved the couples, but they kept an eye out for anyone that was getting too exclusive, because that was of course at odds with the community's ideals. Yeah, and other couplings were enforced and created by the committee itself, which is kind of a strange idea. This is where it gets a little disturbing. Yeah, Noise would initiate teen girls, while his wife and sister would do the same for boys. So this is one type of arrangement that was made to sort of introduce these younger people into the system. Yeah, and these these couples that were formed by the committee not because of some other attraction. After the members hit their twenties, they were usually allowed to choose have a little more choice in who their partners were going to be. But interestingly, it is this regulation surround ding not just sex, but eventually child bearing that eventually signaled the beginning of the end for the community. So Noise decided that it seemed like the Kingdom of Heaven wasn't immediately on hand, and he started thinking that maybe they should start having more children and and beef up the numbers a little bit and have the community grow. So he started to approve natural reproduction, no longer using male continents. But there's a catch, only the reproduction between partners that seemed to be a good spiritual match with each other. Yeah, he calls it Sturp culture. That's the name that he gave it, and it basically says that only those with the highest spiritual development will be allowed to reproduce. So couples would have to apply to the committee and either be accepted, rejected, or rematched with another person. And it was pretty successful. Forty eight kids or fifty eight, depending on which you read, were born between eighteen sixty nine and eighteen sevent nine. Nine of those were Noise kids. Because of course, he has the highest level of spiritual development. And one of the strange things about this is, of course it is very much inspired by eugenics. It's spiritual, but it is eugenics, and he had read quite a bit about it and was trying to emulate that. But obviously it read a lot of hard feelings. In addition to children, there were couples who were rejected, who felt jealous of the people who did get to have children. Some of the new parents were sad because they're forced to turn their kids over to this communal upbringing. And so by eighteen seventy eight, some of the younger community members were getting really tired of it. They were getting fed up with being rejected or matched with the people they didn't want, or having to give up their kids, and they wanted romance and monogamous marriage and family, and so some of them started to pull up and leave the community, often when they were rejected by the committee. And trouble was compounded by noise passing on administration more and more to his son Theodore, who was not very competent, and in eighteen seventy nine he fled to Canada because he was faced with this moral lawsuit, and it only took two months for the community to end the practice of complex marriage and mutual criticism. Can imagine maybe people are a little bit tired of that, but it's interesting to see how how quickly it crumbles with without him, it dissolved quickly. But it didn't end there, right, not exactly after the community dissolved in a couple of months. Within a year, they became a corporation, which is a total surprise. Which was as a total shock, but I mean when you look at it, they already had the foundations for this and this share all things group. They got together and decided that instead of property and partners, they would share talk in business. Yeah, So they formed the Oneida Community Limited, which was a joint stock company that made silver plate. Because they were quite successful and good in this manufacturing realm, and probably they were also thinking they had invested their life's work into a community, you want to get some kind of return on it, even if it's in the form of stock. That sort of goes against their their original community ideals. But Onida Silver is of course still one of the most famous American silver companies today. Of their motto. Interestingly, like I checked out their website to see what they were what they were offering these days, and their motto is bring life to the table, which I'm probably reading too much into that. And the mansion house is also still intact. You can tour it, stay the night, and some people even rent apartments there. Only one trusting room is still left for show, however, the one I mentioned that is really right off of the upper sitting room. And um, I think maybe we could close out with this quote from an Oneida expert. He's a historian, Robert S. Fogerty, and he wrote quote, there's some who think Noise is just a lecture, pure and simple. There are others who believe that he was a great forward thinking individual who is a great religious figure. I think it's fifty fifty to be honest. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday Classic SyncE. This is out of the archive. If you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now. So here is our current contact information. We are at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History all over social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works? Dot com

Happy Saturday, everybody. We recently got an email from listener Ellen who asked us to do a show about the onidat Utopia, and that's one that's already in our archive from back in tleven from our previous hosts Sarah and Babuina. One of the things that's really strongly associated with the Anida community was free love and complex marriages. And that means that there is a little more sex talk, in a little more candid sex talk in today's show than you might typically associate with us. It might even be a lot more so Happy listening, Welcome to Stuff you missed in history Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina Chuckerboarding, and today we're gonna talk a little bit more about free love. I mean, hopefully that makes you keep on listening right away. But I was thinking about it because we did a podcast a couple of weeks ago on Victoria wood Hall, who was the first female presidential candidate. And I don't know if you want to give a quick recap of her beliefs on free love. Yeah, she basically didn't believe free in free love in the sense that everyone should be having sex with each other. But she did believe that people should have the choice whether or not to be together. So that was just a little bit about it. You didn't have to be stuck in a marriage if you didn't want to be. Now, So we we had her on our minds. And then also I co edited an article recently that Molly Edmonds wrote one of the hosts of Stuff Mom Never Told You on polyamory, and so it came up again, and she actually even mentioned the Oneida Community in her article. So both of those examples got me thinking about this community, which is probably the most famous example of organized free love in American history, and it is, of course the Oneida Commune or Oneida Community in New York State. Yeah, when I first started researching this with you, it seemed almost too crazy to be real. I don't know, Maybe I've just lived too sheltered a life. Maybe I'm alone in this, but I don't know. Can you tell us a little bit about some of these things? It does sound too crazy to be real, And that's partly because the people that made up this large Victorian community shared not only property and labor, but of course sexual partners, and they surprisingly earned boatloads of money through these really successful marketing schemes. I think that's sort of the first loop in this In this episode, they were actually quite successful financially. Another potentially strange fact about them they regarded the genders equally and they shared labor, so pretty surprising. The ladies even more pantaloons. You can look up pictures of them. They have short skirts and little pantaloons underneath. And um. Then, maybe the strangest thing of all. Their eventual undoing came about when this eugenics inspired breeding pro Graham left the younger members yearning for good old fashioned courtly love and and monogamous marriage. And for those of you who own some fine Oneida silver, you might know where it goes from there. The commune doesn't last forever, much like a lot of other communes, even those that are often considered to be the most successful in American history, like Oneida. So who was behind this Oneida community in the first place. This guy named John Humphrey. Noise and it's not doesn't look like noise. It's n O y E s. In case you want to look up this guy a little more. But yeah, the commune and the ideas behind it came from his ideas and preaching. And he was born in eighteen eleven in Vermont. He was a wealthy kid. He went to Dartmouth and then to law school. Really seemed to be on the right track to being a well off New England lawyer until he attends a revival of evangelist Charles Finney in eighteen thirty one, and at that point he decides to become a minister instead, so big career change. But but even then he seems like he was possibly on the track to becoming just a well off New England minister instead of a lawyer. He went to Andover Theological Seminary. From there he transferred to Yale. But after that his ideas started to get kind of out there, and definitely two out there. For Yale, he believed in something called perfectionism, which was the idea that after conversion we are free from sin, which obviously that idea didn't sit very well with the Calvinist faculty at Yale and they denied his ordination. Yeah, so just to give you a little background on the beliefs that he had. They extend from the central idea of Perfectionism, and they're pretty controversial. He, for one thing, thinks the Second Coming has come and gone already. In fact, he thinks that happened in a d seventy at the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. This meant that man didn't have to wait for heaven to be one with God. You could do it here on earth as well. But to do so you had to leave the world and live according to the laws of heaven, like maybe in a commune run by noise. So he gets kicked out of Yale, and he starts kind of meeting with other perfectionists, learning the drill, talking to people going on the circuit, and he decides, well, I'm going to start my own group here, and he organizes the Bible Communists in Putney, Vermont, in eighteen thirty six and preaches love and harmony to them. And it's interesting to sort of get a look at what type of people were joining this group, the Bible Communists. They were mostly small town folks. They came from all sorts of occupation, something that probably proved useful down the line, and you know, maybe if it had stayed at this level, it would have been pretty under the radar. You know, a religious group that's too radical for Gale, but not so radical that it doesn't fit in in some way with all of the revivals sweeping the United States at this time, then Noise shakes things up a little bit. Yeah, he doesn't just keep it at that level. Just a year after starting that group, Noise writes the so called battle Axe Letter. And this letter it really gets the public riled up. It stirs up a lot of controversy because it advocates free love. Specifically, it says, quote, when the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, there will be no marriage. And his rationale came from scripture. It came from Matthew, which says for in the Resurrection, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. So Noise took this to mean that marriage should not be exclusive. All men should be married to all women and it's something called complex marriage. So this is definitely an example of free love that's different from the one we talked about in the Victoria Woodhole episode. Quite different in fact, but the idea, just like Victoria Woodhell made Noise in his followers incredibly in its corious and when they actually start practicing complex marriage by eighteen forty six, which is a little bit after they decide that they're going to share all their property and all their belongings, it does not sit well with their neighbors in Putney, Vermont, not at all. And Noise is arrested for adultery because he is married legally, and he jumps bail, and by eighteen forty eight he and most of his followers DeCamp for Oneida, New York. And there are a few other satellite communities, but the main Oneada community is set up there in New York and it lasts for another thirty years. So we're gonna talk more about free love and that aspect of the community later, but first, it's interesting to figure out how these perfectionists Biblical communists actually made a living. Yeah, well, at first they don't write the two hundred people that live in this community. They try farming and logging. It's a situation where men and women are sharing the same rights and lay bur but the community isn't doing well enough to support itself for the long term. So then things start picking up eventually, though when they start manufacturing things again into manufacturing work a little more reliable. Yeah, So what sorts of things were they manufacturing. They were canning and jarring veggies and fruit, also processing silk and printing. They were milling grist mills and sawmills both and making small goods like traveling bags. Yeah, and there. That was all pretty successful for them. But the big win, the thing that really made them sustainable, was the invention of one of the community's members, a guy named Suel new House, and he came up with a new kind of lightweight animal trap for for animals, and the trap market at the time was not so crowded that you couldn't have a new a new trap birth through and so by the mid eighteen fifties, they were making so many of these traps, and they were selling them so well that they had to hire on wade workers, which was kind of at odds with their belief because they were not only against slavery, they were also against wage labor, and especially seasonal wage labor, because at this point people would work, they'd have jobs during the summer, and then they'd get laid off in the winter, especially in a place like New York where there were pretty heavy winters, so here they were doing it themselves, you know, hiring seasonally to make these traps. But they did create many things. I mean, I think we all know some of the results of their inventiveness, for example, the Victor mouse trap and the Lazy Susan. I was so excited to learn that they were responsible for this. It's made such a difference in my life. Excellent piece of trivia, I think. Well, And the interesting thing about the Lazy season Um, one of the important things in the community was that mediocracy was key. You were never supposed to be lazy, but you weren't supposed to try to strive above all the others. And I think it's maybe a little funny that the Lazy Susan is the result of that, a convenience product at least. But even though some inventions did stand out and some adventures did stand out in this community community, that word was still definitely the key. Even labor was social. They would hold these bees to complete tasks in a timely manner um. And maybe you can talk about the bees a little more, Sarah, Yeah, I mean probably most people are maybe familiar with quilting bees, that kind of thing where everybody gets together and you make all the quilts. You know, you have the tops piece together already, but you go ahead and do the more boring work, which is is attaching it to the bottom and putting in the padding and everything. But they wouldn't do this just for quilts. They would do it for any kind of task that needed to be accomplished quickly. So for instance, like bringing in the hay it's something you better do before it rains heavily, or making these bags. You know, they'd all get together. And the interesting thing about it is, like you mentioned earlier, they really did emphasize the community aspect. It was something that was supposed to be fun, not just boring work if you're doing it yourself. And there's even a quote from their second annual report where they wrote that the task could be done quote at a single stroke with all the enthusiastic, sportive feeling of a game of ball. That does sound rather exciting, but it does beg the question also, if a hayin bee is as fun as a game of ball, then what is downtime like in this community? And again we see that it's really communal. The adults live in what is called the mansion house, which was a three story modern home complete with shared dining and living spaces. It's a pretty handsome home actually still stands. Yeah, and it's interesting. One of the perks of living in Oneida meant that because of scale, the community could afford some things that other people couldn't. They could afford luxuries like um furnaces and heated drawing rooms, things that only wealthy people could afford at the time. Yeah, because it is a mansion house, it just has a lot of people living in it. So we're going to take you on a little tour of the home. Um, starting in the dining room, which could hold the entire community. And I think this is a really interesting thing they did to to ensure that clicks wouldn't pop up in the dining room as they always do, right, Yeah, the typical Yeah, you would take your seat by your place in the serving line, so I guess you could maybe jump the line to be with your friend, but you would essentially be seated at random, so so no favorites. After dinner. After dinner with with any of your random community members, you would move on to the big hall and have a meeting. And the hall is sort of the center of the religious aspect of this community too, But it doesn't look at all like a church. It had paintings of justice and music and astronomy and history, allegorical paintings, and it's also where members would discuss their spiritual concerns and talk about community concerns and then maybe relax a little too and enjoy a concert. I think the community kept a band among its members or some other kind of entertainment, and it's quite the program. And if that program on any given night was promising enough, maybe some tourists would stop by pay about twenty five cents for an evening of grand entertainment. So they build it. Yeah, but the gatherings in the big hall, they weren't always that fun. So, for instance, you wouldn't want to show up on a night where they were doing quote mutual criticism, and on those nights that's when everyone could basically air their grievances with everyone else. Reminds me kind of a festivus, not to make a comparison with a fake religion, but um, the mutual criticism part is one of the strangest aspects of this to me, that you would go face to face with these people who you lived with and worked with every day, and tell them what was wrong, which could be not only you're not working hard enough to support the community, but you're working too hard. You're going above and beyond, and it's it's not you don't fit in. Yeah. It goes back to that goal of mediocrity that you mentioned before. So after getting some of these neighborly criticisms off your chest, you might go on up to the upper sitting Room, which was a well appointed salon where you could page through some books like Charles Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drewd, which I think you read recently. I read the spin off. You read the spin off. Sorry, my mistake. They wouldn't have read the spin off, probably not quite, but they might have also read some bound copies of magazines like Atlantic Monthly. Anyway, just your basic chill out space, take some time off after the hanging, Yeah, and then it's off to bed in your private room with a twin bed. Yeah. And here's the kicker there. You would definitely be by yourself when you we're going off to bed. And this brings us to the complex marriage which he knew we were going to have to talk about. Eventually, it's what made the Onida community so infamous, and Noise believed that for the community to live without sin, they would need to quote mail marriage to the cross. So he was against monogamous marriage, but he wasn't against sex. He was actually quite in favor of it as long as it took place between multiple partners. But he knew that there was a potential problem with that, and that was that complex marriage would soon produce a whole lot of kids, more kids than the community could support. So he instituted this practice that he himself had begun after his wife had suffered from four premature births and death, and it was he called it male continents, and it was basically male birth control UM. He decided to do it himself after her after her premature births UM. She was quite understandably distraught over the death of those four kids, and he decided that she shouldn't have to go through it again. But he actually turns it into part of his philosophy after that. It's not just something that happened personally to him. He takes it and makes it part of the community. So he separates sex into two components. Essentially, the pleasurable aspect of it and the reproductive aspect and treats them into entirely different ways. So, since Adam and Eveson, the reproductive part had been dominant, but by taking the reproductive aspect out of the picture, people would be free to indulge in the more pleasurable part. So this is how he saw it. Yeah, and this male continence idea that he comes up with really does work pretty well for the community as far as limiting the number of children born, because between eighteen forty eight and eighteen sixty nine only thirty one kids are born. And we're going to talk a little bit more about kids in the community later, But after they were weaned, they were raised communally in this children's house by guardians. But there aren't just rules about how people were supposed to have sex and not reproduced. There were also rules about how the matchups even were made. Yeah, And the main thing about these rules is that there were no secrets, right. That was the essential component here. For example, if you had sex with someone, it wasn't even happening in a private room. Instead, you would go to these small trysting rooms, is how they were known. I think right off of the upper sitting room, and you could essentially book a room for a few hours, but everybody knew about it when you did. It seems so awkward to they are right off the room. I think one that is still in existence as a as a show piece really is right off the sitting room where everyone is hanging out. But really everyone already knew who was matched up anyways, because couples had to be approved by the Central Guidance Committee, which was made of course of Noise and his family and other elders. And they not only approved the couples, but they kept an eye out for anyone that was getting too exclusive, because that was of course at odds with the community's ideals. Yeah, and other couplings were enforced and created by the committee itself, which is kind of a strange idea. This is where it gets a little disturbing. Yeah, Noise would initiate teen girls, while his wife and sister would do the same for boys. So this is one type of arrangement that was made to sort of introduce these younger people into the system. Yeah, and these these couples that were formed by the committee not because of some other attraction. After the members hit their twenties, they were usually allowed to choose have a little more choice in who their partners were going to be. But interestingly, it is this regulation surround ding not just sex, but eventually child bearing that eventually signaled the beginning of the end for the community. So Noise decided that it seemed like the Kingdom of Heaven wasn't immediately on hand, and he started thinking that maybe they should start having more children and and beef up the numbers a little bit and have the community grow. So he started to approve natural reproduction, no longer using male continents. But there's a catch, only the reproduction between partners that seemed to be a good spiritual match with each other. Yeah, he calls it Sturp culture. That's the name that he gave it, and it basically says that only those with the highest spiritual development will be allowed to reproduce. So couples would have to apply to the committee and either be accepted, rejected, or rematched with another person. And it was pretty successful. Forty eight kids or fifty eight, depending on which you read, were born between eighteen sixty nine and eighteen sevent nine. Nine of those were Noise kids. Because of course, he has the highest level of spiritual development. And one of the strange things about this is, of course it is very much inspired by eugenics. It's spiritual, but it is eugenics, and he had read quite a bit about it and was trying to emulate that. But obviously it read a lot of hard feelings. In addition to children, there were couples who were rejected, who felt jealous of the people who did get to have children. Some of the new parents were sad because they're forced to turn their kids over to this communal upbringing. And so by eighteen seventy eight, some of the younger community members were getting really tired of it. They were getting fed up with being rejected or matched with the people they didn't want, or having to give up their kids, and they wanted romance and monogamous marriage and family, and so some of them started to pull up and leave the community, often when they were rejected by the committee. And trouble was compounded by noise passing on administration more and more to his son Theodore, who was not very competent, and in eighteen seventy nine he fled to Canada because he was faced with this moral lawsuit, and it only took two months for the community to end the practice of complex marriage and mutual criticism. Can imagine maybe people are a little bit tired of that, but it's interesting to see how how quickly it crumbles with without him, it dissolved quickly. But it didn't end there, right, not exactly after the community dissolved in a couple of months. Within a year, they became a corporation, which is a total surprise. Which was as a total shock, but I mean when you look at it, they already had the foundations for this and this share all things group. They got together and decided that instead of property and partners, they would share talk in business. Yeah, So they formed the Oneida Community Limited, which was a joint stock company that made silver plate. Because they were quite successful and good in this manufacturing realm, and probably they were also thinking they had invested their life's work into a community, you want to get some kind of return on it, even if it's in the form of stock. That sort of goes against their their original community ideals. But Onida Silver is of course still one of the most famous American silver companies today. Of their motto. Interestingly, like I checked out their website to see what they were what they were offering these days, and their motto is bring life to the table, which I'm probably reading too much into that. And the mansion house is also still intact. You can tour it, stay the night, and some people even rent apartments there. Only one trusting room is still left for show, however, the one I mentioned that is really right off of the upper sitting room. And um, I think maybe we could close out with this quote from an Oneida expert. He's a historian, Robert S. Fogerty, and he wrote quote, there's some who think Noise is just a lecture, pure and simple. There are others who believe that he was a great forward thinking individual who is a great religious figure. I think it's fifty fifty to be honest. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday Classic SyncE. This is out of the archive. If you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete. Now. So here is our current contact information. We are at History Podcast at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History all over social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works? Dot com