The Oneida Community ( oh-NYE-də) was a Christian perfectionist communal society founded by John Humphrey Noyes and his followers in 1848 near Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in 70 AD, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be perfect and free of sin in this world, not just in Heaven, a belief called perfectionism. The Oneida Community practiced communalism – in the sense of communal property and possessions – group marriage, male sexual continence, Oneida stirpiculture (a form of eugenics), and mutual criticism. The community site originally covered more than 160 acres of land surrounding Oneida Creek in Madison County, New York and Oneida County, New York. The community's original 87 members grew to 172 by February 1850, 208 by 1852, and 306 by 1878. Other Noyesian communities were founded in Wallingford, Connecticut; Newark, New Jersey; Putney and Cambridge, Vermont. The branches were closed in 1854 except for the Wallingford branch, which operated until its destruction by tornado in 1878. The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, converting itself to a joint-stock company. This eventually became the silverware company Oneida Limited, one of the largest in the world.
History
The land the Oneida Community settled on was made available for purchase by Euro-American settlers after its acquisition by the State of New York in a series of agreements with the Oneida Indian Nation in 1840 and 1842. The initial farmstead of the Oneida Community was purchased by Jonathan Burt, an early convert to the religious doctrine of Christian perfectionism. In 1847, Burt invited John Humphrey Noyes and his associates in Putney, Vermont to come to Oneida and establish a Perfectionist community. At the time, Noyes and his followers were living in Putney, Vermont in a group known as the Putney Association. The group lived communally, as one family sharing property and work, in a system they called "Bible communism." Controversially, the community also practiced free love, complex marriage, and polyamory. Noyes was charged with committing adultery, and to escape the charges, the group moved to Oneida in March 1848, to found the Oneida Community.
Structure
Even though the community only reached a maximum population of about 300, it had a complex bureaucracy of 27 standing committees and 48 administrative sections. All community members were expected to work, each according to their abilities. Women tended to do many of the domestic duties. Although more skilled jobs tended to remain with an individual member (the financial manager, for example, held his post throughout the life of the community), community members rotated through the more unskilled jobs, working in the house, the fields, or the various industries. As Oneida thrived, it hired outsiders. The community was a major employer in the area and had approximately 200 employees by 1870. Secondary industries included manufacturing leather travel bags, weaving palm frond hats, construction of rustic garden furniture, and tourism. A community member, Canadian Sewell Newhouse, invented and patented the Oneida trap, which was popular among trappers at the time. Silverware manufacturing began in 1877, relatively late in the community's life, and still exists.
Complex marriage The Oneida Community practiced complex marriage or free love – a term that Noyes is credited with coining. Any member was free to have sex with any other who consented. The community frowned upon possessiveness and exclusive relationships. Noyes developed a distinction between amative and propagative love.
Complex marriage meant that everyone in the community was married to everyone else. All men and women were expected to have sexual relations and did. The basis for complex marriage was the Pauline passage about there being no marriage in heaven meant that there should be no marriage on earth, but that no marriage did not mean no sex. But sex meant children; not only could the community not afford children in the early years, the women were not enthusiastic about a regime that would have kept them pregnant most of the time. They developed a distinction between amative and propagative love. Propagative love was sex for the purpose of having children; amative love was sex for the purpose of expressing love. The difference was what Noyes called "male continence", in which the male partner avoided ejaculation. Noyes argued that this practice not only kept them from producing unwanted children but also taught the male considerable self-control. The system worked very well. Women over 40 were to act as sexual "mentors" to adolescent boys because these relationships had a minimal chance of conceiving. Furthermore, these women became religious role models for the young men. Likewise, older men often introduced young women to sex. Noyes often used his judgment in determining the partnerships that would form, and he would often encourage relationships between the non-devout and the devout in the community in the hope that the attitudes and behaviors of the devout would influence the attitudes of the non-devout. In 1993, the community archives were made available to scholars for the first time. Contained within the archives was the journal of Tirzah Miller, Noyes' niece, who wrote extensively about her romantic and sexual relations with other members of Oneida.
Mutual criticism Every member of the community was subject to criticism by a committee or the community as a whole during a general meeting. The goal was to eliminate undesirable character traits. Various contemporary sources contend that Noyes himself was the subject of criticism, although less often and of probably less severe criticism than the rest of the community. Charles Nordhoff said he had witnessed the criticism of a member he referred to as "Charles", writing the following account of the incident:
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