THE ONEIDA COMMUNITY
For those of you outside the US, the name Oneida might not mean much. But for anyone from the US, if you’ve ever turned over a piece of silverware while out to dinner, you have probably seen the name Oneida stamped on the back of a spoon. That’s because Oneida Limited is the largest supplier of dinnerware to the foodservice industry in North America and one of the world’s largest designers and sellers of cutlery and tableware. And this massive company that aims to bring families together at a nice traditional table, started life as a cult.
JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES
John Humphrey Noyes was born on September 3, 1811 in Brattleboro Vermont to father John Noyes and mother Polly Noyes (born Hayes). John Noyes was a man of many professions and worked as a minister, teacher, businessman and as a member of the US House of Representatives. Polly Noyes was the aunt of Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th President of the United States.
The area of Vermont where Noyes was born was an interesting one. The area was home to good farming land around the Connecticut River Valley. And this area of Vermont was also the site of constant religious revolution. Following the Revolutionary War, many conservative Calvinists settled Southern Vermont. Calvinism is also called Reformed Christianity or Reformed Protestantism. Now we’re not theologians but as far as we can understand Calvinism is a branch of protestantism formed in the 16th century. We’re not gonna go into the whole history of Calvinism because it’s long and complicated but just know that Calvinism led to many of the major Protestant sects we know of today and found strong footholds in Europe and the United Kingdom. The Calvinist theology found particular popularity with English Puritans and eventually became very popular in North America at the beginning of the 17th Century.
Polly Noyes was a strict Calvinist and was intensely religious. Prior to the birth of her first son, Polly and John had three daughters: Mary, Elizabeth and Joanna. Following Joanna’s birth Polly fell into a severe depression and feared she was going insane. She turned to prayer and asked God for relief. And he delivered, so to speak, because Polly soon became pregnant and gave birth to John Humphrey Noyes. This birth took on a very religious aura and Polly saw her son as the reason she was lifted out of her depression. She decided to devote her life to the religious upbringing of her son. And with John Noyes often away on business, Polly more or less raised John Humphrey by herself, focusing on his morality.
By all accounts, Noyes was a delicate child who had trouble building an identity for himself outside his mother. When he was three he fell into a tub of boiling laundry water and was badly burned. During the time it took him to heal he became even more dependent on Polly. He was also shy, lacked self-confidence, and suffered from severe social anxiety which ran in his family but was referred to as the “Atkinson difficulty” based on the name of the New Hampshire town where John Noyes hailed from. When he began school he was a good student but had trouble fitting in.
His mother took him to his first religious revival at age eight and he enjoyed his time there. For those of us not versed in the lingo, a revival is a gathering that included a several religious services. These services are held to inspire current church members to convert new followers or to bring new followers into the faith. Noyes, at just eight, decided to convert. But because he was so young, his devotion to the church wasn’t seen as binding. Only an adult could truly give themselves over to God.
He went away to boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts at just nine years old but was terribly homesick the whole time. But he didn’t need to stay there for long, because the Noyes family soon moved to Putney, Vermont where John Noyes retired to “focus on the education of his children” (which now included another two sons, George and William, and another daughter, Harriet). Polly had chosen Putney because of the town’s religious fervour and because she felt the town was extra-holy basically. John Humphrey was moved to Brattleboro Academy to be closer to home. There he finished out his studies before heading to college in September 1826 at age 15. His father wanted him to go to Yale, however his mother thought Dartmouth was a better religious fit, so off to Dartmouth he went.
But he didn’t enjoy his time there. He still struggled with intense shyness and wanted but often failed to assert himself. After four years he graduated and decided to go into a career in law, not the ministry as his mother expected of him. While working as a lawyer, he fell in love with a young woman named Caroline. And he wanted to ask her to marry him. But he was too scared and hightailed it back home to Putney instead.
But what of his law career you say? Well it turns out he was a bad lawyer. His first attempt at arguing in court was a debacle. He was scared to death and stammered and trembled through the whole thing. Disheartened, he returned home to Putney. It was here, in 1831, that the first glimmers of the Oneida Community began to form.
Perfectionism & Communalism
Noyes attended a revival in Putney that strengthened his faith and set him down the path his mother had always wanted him to follow: the ministry. He enrolled at Andover Theological Seminary in 1831 and began his study. But he didn’t really like Andover. Are we sensing a pattern here? He found the lectures boring and felt the course of study didn’t leave him enough time for his favourite leisure activity: reading the bible. Fun guy. He became obsessed with finding answers to his daily struggles within the bible, applying whatever he read to the problem at hand. Kind of like spinning a globe, stopping it with your finger and deciding that wherever you land is where you’ll go on vacation next, Noyes turned to the bible to help him decide if he should leave Andover for Yale. He was on the fence so he randomly opened the bible and landed on Matthew 28:5,6 which read: “Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus which was crucified. He is not here.”
So off he went to New Haven to attend Yale and study under the popular lecturer Nathaniel William Taylor. Taylor’s brand of theology became wildly popular with students. It combined conservative Calvinist beliefs with more liberal ideas. While strict Calvinism taught that man was made in God’s image but tainted by sin and only through repenting could that sin be resolved, Taylor preached that man was not inherently sinful, but that man was capable of making a choice between sin and virtue.
Noyes studied at Yale from 1832 to 1834 and it was there that he finally gained some self-confidence. He became a persuasive and forceful debater and ultimately earned a license to preach after debating Dr. Taylor himself. He also found time for other activities besides lonely bible study. He even helped found an Antislavery Society in New Haven, one of the first in the country.
It was during his studies at Yale that Noyes first discovered the religious concept of perfectionism. During his second year at Yale Noyes attempted to figure out the exact date of the second coming of Christ. Which, like, who among us? But during this process he decided that this super duper important event had already happened in 70AD and as such, mankind was now living in a new age. And unlike many interpretations that see the second coming of Christ as a doomsday/judgement day event, Noyes believed that because Christ had already returned, one could achieve “perfection” or lead a life without sin while still on Earth and not have to wait for the afterlife.
It’s a lot to wrap your head around. But basically Noyes decided that he was “perfect” and without sin. He found great relief with this decision. His whole life he had suffered from many physical and mental ailments but after deciding he was perfect, they melted away. Apparently he went around telling everyone all about how great perfectionism was. Because eventually he was expelled from Yale for being a Christian Perfectionist. And this also led to his brand new preaching license being revoked. But that didn’t stop him. He had seen the light and he wasn’t about to slow down!
Noyes returned to Putney and began to preach his new concept of perfectionism. It caught on quickly and by 1836 Noyes had started the Putney Bible School to spread his teachings. The details about the early years of this Putney religious community get a bit fuzzy, but we imagine he was just preaching away, convincing more people that they, too, were perfect and could bring about the kingdom of heaven right here on God’s green earth!
In 1838, Noyes married a woman named Harriet Holton after converting her to the idea of perfectionism. And during the first six years of their marriage Harriet gave birth five times, but had only one surviving child. Noyes noticed the distress this caused Harriet and began intense research into sex within marriage. He wanted to find a way for his wife to enjoy sex without having to worry about becoming pregnant again. To achieve this goal, initially, Noyes and his wife lived separately starting in 1844, which they both reported brought them a lot of happiness. It was during this time that Noyes began his work developing the idea of “male continence”.
And here is where we get to the first of Noyes’s fairly progressive beliefs. The idea of male continence, sometimes also called coitus reservatus, is fairly simple. During intercourse the penetrative partner does not attempt to ejaculate within the receptive partner but instead attempts to remain at the plateau phase of heightened sexual excitement for as long as possible. This technique allowed Noyes and Harriet to enjoy sex without worrying about another difficult pregnancy, an early form of birth control. This concept of male sexual continence became one of the major foundations of the Oneida Community which officially formed in 1844.
The Oneida Community
By 1844 Noyes had converted enough people to his beliefs in Putney that the Putney Bible school morphed into a communal living society. There were about 40 converts to his faith, mostly farmers, and they called themselves the Putney community. The group followed Noyes’s teachings of perfectionism as well as male sexual continence. They also followed many traditional communal living ideas like working for the good of the community, not just for the individual and raising the children within the community as a group, not in individual families.
Pretty soon Noyes came up with the concept that, really, if a group of adults were all living communally and working to build a perfect society together, and if all those adults liked having sex within their marriages without reproducing, then surely those adults would enjoy having sex with people they weren’t married to. But, obviously, you can’t be perfect and without sin if you’re an adulterer. So what’s a budding cult leader to do? Well the answer is simple really: Complex Marriage!
Here’s how it works: Every man within the community is married to every woman, and every woman to every man. So anyone can have sex with anyone else (but hetero sex only please, it’s still the 1840s after all!). And this is all kosher because they’re all married. This idea, Noyes claimed, was based on Jesus’s teachings that there were no marriages in heaven.
And because they were perfect, the members of the community didn’t bother hiding their beliefs about sex or marriage. Which, of course, scandalised the Vermonters around them. And as all good New Englanders are wont to do when faced with something that butts up against tradition, the residents of Putney, Vermont grabbed their pitchforks and formed an angry mob to run these radicals out of town. They arrested Noyes for adultery. And after he was released on bail Noyes decided it was time to high-tail it outta there.
He and the Putney community picked up stakes and headed to Oneida, New York where Noyes knew some friendly perfectionists with plenty of land. It was there in 1848 that the community settled for good and formed the community of the Oneida Perfectionists. The group initially lived out of an old hut and sawmill that had been left by the Oneida Indians while working the land and building up their community. In no time at all the group had several different businesses up and running to help support their communal lifestyle. They fixed up the old sawmill and began selling lumber to nearby farmers. They set up a printing office and distributed free paper to the locals. And John Humphrey Noyes, man of philosophy and lofty ideas, even took up blacksmithing.
It was here that the Oneida Community showed the first hint of their future legacy. In the blacksmith shop, the community produced animal traps. But they had no money for machinery so they made them by hand. And they soon earned a reputation for having exquisitely made traps. Pretty soon this became the bulk of their business and the group began to thrive. Unlike in Putney, the locals in New York generally welcomed the perfectionists and many locals were actually employed to work by the group. By 1870 the Oneida Community was one of the largest employers in the region.
They bought more land and in 1848 built a large communal house for everyone to live in. They called this the Mansion House. Let’s check in on what everyone was up to while living in that big house. We know they were practicing complex marriage and sexual continence. The group also shared all work duties with people rotating through different jobs. Women usually took on domestic duties, but not always. “Skilled” members often kept individual jobs, for example the group’s financial manager remained the same. They rotated people through the “unskilled” jobs. And they raised children as a group.
And what about children? With all this free love there were bound to be children born into the group. And there were, but the group was very careful to make a distinction between amative love and propagative love. Or in simpler terms: sex for fun vs sex for babies. The community couldn’t afford a bunch of kiddos running around in the early days, and the women weren’t too keen on the idea of being constantly pregnant. So Noyes’s fave blue-balls technique worked out quite well. They were able to keep the group population under control while still boning like bunnies.
And now we dive into the more cult-y behaviours of the group. You see, one is not born knowing how to participate in this kind of free love society. So how are these youngsters to now how to control themselves when it comes to sex? Well Noyes had an answer for that of course. He decided that the post-menopausal women in the community would act as sexual “mentors” to the adolescent boys in the community. And likewise, adult men would “initiate” girls into the ways of complex marriage and free love. Noyes often picked these pairings himself and wouldn’t you know he was pretty fond of making himself the sexual initiator for many, many young girls. And unfortunately we’re not just talking 18 year olds and up here. We’re talking about some girls as young as 10. So Noyes and his community advocated for the repeated rape of young girls and young boys. We’re starting to see the dark side of this happy-go-lucky commune now.
Another popular fun activity of the group was mutual criticism. Every member of the community was subject to criticism by a committee or by the community as a whole. This was meant to eliminate undesirable character traits. It basically consisted of one person being singled out and the rest of the group members taking turns listing all the things they didn’t like about the person in question. The person had to take this criticism in stride and vow to do better in the future in order to continue living in the community.
It wasn’t all bad though. The Oneida community gave women a large amount of freedom compared to the wider world at the time. Women within the community were regarded as equals to men, though everyone who wasn’t Noyes was subject to his will. The community’s communal child care allowed women to work outside the home. Many tried their hand within the group’s various business ventures and took on craftsman or sales roles. They also had an active role in shaping the religious and business policy within the group. And women’s sexual satisfaction was recognised and actively sought out in the community’s sexual interactions.
Stirpiculture
But you didn’t think we could end on a good note did you? That’s because by the late 1860s the Oneida community was quite wealthy. They were making bank thanks to all their various businesses and could easily support a new generation of Oneida children being born. And after reading some Plato, Darwin, and books by agricultural breeders, Noyes decided the the community should start up a programme of “scientific propagation to grate humans through intentional reproduction rather than haphazard sex.” He called this programme Stirpiculture and it became one of the earliest forms of eugenics in American history.
Noyes operated the experiment alongside a committee. Men and women would be paired up by Noyes and the committee based on their superior mental and spiritual qualities. Community members and couples could request to have a child, but ultimately the decision and pairing was up to Noyes. He generally favoured pairing older men, whom he deemed wiser and more spiritually sound, with younger women usually between ages 20 and 40. Each participant was required to sign a contract committing themselves to the experiment and to God and his human representative, Noyes. By signing this contract, the participant also pledged to avoid “personal feelings in regard to child-bearing” for the betterment of the community. So not only could you not choose who to have children with, but you weren’t allowed to form a personal connection with that child once it was born.
This was enforced by the communal child-rearing system. Babies would stay with their mother for 15 months before being sent to the Children’s House to live. They would still occasionally sleep with their mothers at night but were quickly weaned out of this and would instead sleep with different members of the community who were frequently switched out. This was to prevent strong attachments forming between adult and child. Noyes believed that a strong attachment between mother and child could cause poor health, illness, and/or suffering for the child. Which couldn’t possibly be a reaction to his own overly close relationship with his mother…right?
The stirpiculture experiment lasted for 10 years from 1869-1879. During those ten years, 58 children were born as a result of Noyes’s pairings. Most pairings only produced one child. Noyes decided to get in on the game himself. After all, surely the leader of this community was the most mentally and spiritually sound member. Those traits had to be passed along! Noyes and his son Theodore fathered 12 children between them, 11 of whom survived. The 58 children born during the experiment were closely attended to and were well educated. They were under constant guidance of older members of the community and many lived long and successful lives.
Criticism & Decline
But why, you may ask, did this experiment that seemed so successful only last for 10 years? Well times they were a-changing, and the Oneida Community was starting to rub some people the wrong way. By the 1860s the community had started a few off-shoot groups in different locations. They had a small group in Brooklyn that ran a printing business and distributed Noyes’s teachings in print. There was also a community in Wallingford, Connecticut. The Oneida community had also greatly expanded their business endeavours. Their animal trap business which had started out in the blacksmith shop with handcrafting could now produce three hundred thousand traps per year. Which made them lots of money. They also started making and selling silver plated cutlery when the fur trade began to slow down.
They were wildly successful. And with success comes attention. Many outsiders became suspicious of the community’s emphasis on free love and began to regard their system of complex marriage as polygamy. Add to this that Noyes was growing old and wished to hand over the day-to-day operation of the community to his son, Theodore, in order to ensure its survival. When Noyes passed the torch to Theodore things started to go really wrong. Theodore was a bad leader and didn’t really want the job anyway. The transfer of power also divided the community and eventually led to a split. One member, John Tower, attempted to gain control of the community for himself. He was eventually cast out and led a group of former community members across the country to settle in California where the Governor granted Towner control of the newly formed Orange County.
And then came pressure from the law. In New York there was a reform movement happening in the 1870s. Anthony Comstock founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and quickly set his sights on the free-wheeling Oneida community. In 1879, Noyes heard a rumor that he would be arrested for breaking New York’s marriage laws. So he fled to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. He would remain there until his death on April 13, 1886.
This left the community without a strong leader. And many of the younger members started showing signs of breaking with the traditions they had been taught. Just like every generation rebels against their parents, the Oneida youth were no different. They didn’t want to share their spouses with everyone else. They didn’t want to get permission to have children. They wanted monogamy. So in 1879, the community’s system of complex marriage was abandoned. Over the next year over 70 members entered into traditional marriages.
And perhaps more importantly, these members wanted capitalism. The group voted in 1880 to dissolve the commune and transfer the communal property to a joint-stock company called Oneida Community Limited. The company was formed in 1881 with former commune members owning shares. The newly formed company still retained some of the progressive views of the commune, including allowing female board members, but their main focus was the business.
Legacy
By 1899 they focused their production on their silverware business and it began to grow exponentially. The company successfully adapted to the upheaval of the first and second World Wars, contributing to war efforts by expanding their manufacturing. And the postwar boom of babies and families only helped their business. Because what else says traditional family like gorgeous silverware? By 1947 the company became aware that their origins as a free love commune stood at odds to their market position as peddlers of family tradition. They decided the best option would be to burn Noyes’s records and attempt to erase the Oneida community from history. Which actually worked for a while. Most of what we now know of the Oneida community comes from diaries of original members. Especially the diaries of Noyes’s brother George Noyes and his niece Tirzah Miller. By the 1980s Oneida Ltd. produced nearly half of all flatware sold in America under various brand names and subsidiaries.
The Oneida Mansion House was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and still stands today. It is now run by the state of New York as an educational organisation that gives guided tours and hosts events and exhibitions. They focus on preserving the material and social culture of the Oneida Community for future generations.
And that is the story of the Oneida Community, an early cult that was both progressive and super horrifying.
FURTHER READING:
John Humphrey Noyes, 1811-1840 : a social biography
The Perfectionists of Oneida and Wallingford
JOHN HUMPHREY NOYES: The Putney Community
The Oneida Community Moves to the OC
Oneida: From Free Love Utopia to the Well-Set Table
The Polyamorous Christian Socialist Utopia That Made Silverware for Proper Americans
Oneida Community Photographs: A Finding Aid to Selected Images
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