ABSTRACT
Self-contained and self-directed, the American Dream is leery of equating wealth with commonwealth. The single-taxers especially set out to systematically test the different versions of the single tax, maintaining at least a dozen colonies into the 1930s. Historically speaking, when it came to seeding their visions of a better world in the New World, utopian colonies trailed only a step behind their commercially or royally chartered counterparts. On the American side, literature and communal experiment came together most famously in Helicon Hall. From the thousands of American communes that rose and wilted in no time few, however, can beat the brief history of Bride of Christ for sheer entertainment value. Self-contained and self-directed, the American Dream is leery of equating wealth with commonwealth. The dream was over in five years, in its heyday never topping three hundred members. As with the dichotomy between social and bioengineering, the one between capitalism and socialism is a red herring.
