ABSTRACT
Most Anarchists considered mutually linked communities of independent producers as the nuclei to their vision of a society without governments. In the United States, the large experimental field of social Utopias, anarchist circles appeared simultaneously with the debut of socialism during the first half of the nineteenth century. The pioneer founder of anarchist communities was Josiah Warren, who had started out as a follower of Robert Owen in New Harmony in 1825. Members of Sunrise faced election in an atmosphere of mistrust and misunderstandings. The commune had been established to provide security for the people who had hoped to escape the Depression, but they faced even worse economic hardships on the commune at a time when the outside economy was recovering from the Depression in the late 1930s. In spite of their disappointment and frustration with the commune, most members fondly recalled Sunrise in their memoirs, and many remained loyal to their ideals of anarchism and socialism.
