ABSTRACT
The American Civil War (1861-1865) marks a break between a period of practical experiences with small agricultural cooperatives, such as Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, which was based on transcendentalist ideals, and an era characterized by a more politically motivated search for happiness on a national scale. The small-scale communitarian experiments in the United States, inspired by Emersonian transcendentalism, socialist utopianism, or religious millenarianism, met with adversity; most were soon dissolved. For instance, Brook Farm existed only from 1841 to 1847, and the Icarian community in Nauvoo, Illinois, which was founded by Étienne Cabet in 1849, lasted no more than ten years. The religiously inspired sectarian communities of the Shakers and the Oneida group had a longer life but remained small-scale endeavors (Kumar 1987). As mentioned earlier, The Communist Manifesto had ridiculed these sporadic experiments as creations of a “new Jerusalem in duodecimo.”
