In the 1820s, Scottish and Welsh labor radicals such as Frances Wright, Robert Owen, and his son Robert Dale Owen established utopian communities in the United States. They believed that a young nation founded on republican principles would be particularly open to experiments in communal labor, gender equality, and (in Wright’s case) racial justice. Their efforts ultimately failed, but they did arouse impassioned debate. After founding the community of New Harmony, Indiana, in 1828 with his father, Robert Dale Owen returned briefly to Europe. He then joined Wright in New York City, where they established a reform newspaper, reading room, and medical dispensary. Resettling in New Harmony in 1833, Owen continued to advocate for workers’ rights, birth control, and the abolition of slavery. But he also embraced Jacksonian democracy and won election to the Indiana House of Representatives and then the U.S. Congress. Owen thus pursued both utopian communalism and political activism in the larger society.

Former Unitarian minister George Ripley also sought to bridge a critical divide—between physical and intellectual labor. He established a transcendentalist community at Brook Farm in Massachusetts in 1841. In 1845 the farm was reconfigured according to the principles of the French socialist Charles Fourier, who believed that cooperation across classes was necessary to temper the conflicts inherent in capitalist society. He developed a plan for communities, called phalanxes, where residents chose jobs based on their individual interests and were paid according to the contribution of each job to the community’s well-being. Fourier also advocated equality for women. More than forty Fourierist phalanxes were founded in the northern United States during the 1840s.

A more uniquely American experiment, the Oneida community, was established in central New York by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848. He and his followers believed that Christ’s Second Coming had already occurred and embraced the communalism of the early Christian church. But Noyes also advocated sexual freedom and developed a plan for “complex marriage” in which women were liberated from male domination and constant childbearing. Divorce and remarriage were permitted, children were raised communally, and a form of birth control was instituted. Despite the public outrage provoked by Oneida’s sexual practices, the community recruited several hundred residents and thrived for more than three decades.