Paradise Now

November 9, 2015
Jennings reexamines America’s 19th-century utopian projects, viewing them as a response to growing industry and competition in post-Enlightenment Europe, in this thoughtful history. He smartly organizes the book into five sections, each covering a major movement in the “Edenic void” of America: Shakers, New Harmony Owenists, Fourierists, Icarians, and the Perfectionists of the Oneida Community. These movements had many similarities—doing away with property and the family (except the Icarians), preaching cooperation, and focusing on bettering their members—while their fascinating differences owed much to the peculiarities of their founders’ motivating ideologies. Jennings dispels the pastoral image of an easy existence: labor was almost uniformly difficult and money was a consistent problem. But for many, utopian life also had its upsides: attention to education, better diets, fair wages, and sexual liberation were all components of these movements. Perhaps their greatest achievement was gender equality: women found equal rights in many of these communities, and many stepped outside the domestic sphere that confined many of America’s women. Though utopians were still limited in their thinking (particularly in racial terms), Jennings convincingly argues that they were not motivated by “a surfeit of optimism,” but were inspired to find a better society because of a cynical view of the direction that the world around them was heading in. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM.

October 1, 2015
Jennings demonstrates how "no moment in history or place on the globe has been more crowded with utopian longing and utopian experimentation than the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century." The many communes established during this time had much in common as they prepared for the second coming. The looming millennium egged on the leaders of these movements, who sought not a place but a time of peace, equality, and abundance. The Shakers, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, and Perfectionists attracted scores of people who gave up their lives to join others in search of "the dream of utopia." All bought large tracts of land, promoted collective ownership, and adhered to a structured workday. The author proffers a number of plausible reasons for the rise of these groups. The Industrial Revolution was eliminating the single artisan, and the arrival of factories fed the economic inequality that condemned people to filthy urban environments. Each group built a small, working prototype community, and each based their group on farm, school, and home, with education and feminine equality paramount. Members came from a broad swath of the population, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dana at the Fourierist Brook Farm. Although they either over- or understressed individuals, none of the groups could grasp the complexity or variety of human desire. Their aims were admirable, but they suffered from a lack of basic agricultural success. The Shakers and Perfectionists succeeded due to their marketable inventions, including clothespins, bear traps, and cutlery. They may have been similar in many ways, but the differences were marked]e.g., Robert Owen worked to shape men to an ideal, while Charles Fourier demanded that institutions adapt to humans. Jennings proves an able guide to these groups, who "proceeded from the assumption that humankind is somehow meant to live in utopia." The author's comprehensive research makes for absorbing reading as he shows how different people attempted to find perfection and how they failed or succeeded.

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November 1, 2015

Jennings debuts with the story of an intellectually vibrant period in U.S. history: an era before capitalism became the de facto economic ideology; egalitarianism ran rampant; religious diversity exploded; the unlimited promise of scientific progress tantalized; and the "City on a Hill" American experiment remained attractively tenable. This ideologically fecund atmosphere sandwiched between the New Republic and the American Civil War gave birth to around 100 "experimental communities" that might be described as attempts to build a living paradise on earth. From this abundance, Jennings narrows his account to five movements: the Shakers, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, and Oneida Perfectionists. By presenting these five communities beside one another, Jennings permits readers to see the similarities and differences among them. Certain themes, although expressed differently, appear in all five: radical sexuality, communism, scientific curiosity, gender equality, and fervent idealism often expressed religiously. The incongruity of these themes can be expressed, for example with radical sexuality, in which the Shakers disbanded all sex, whereas the Oneida Perfectionists embraced free love; both remained Christian sects. VERDICT Recommended for readers of American history and religion.--Scott Vieira, Rice Univ. Lib., Houston

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Starred review from November 1, 2015
Never short on self-esteem, Etienne Cabet encouraged his devoted followers to regard him as the successor to the works of Christ. But Jennings recognizes this self-deifying man as just one of the dynamic utopians who founded idealistic communities in nineteenth-century America, all convinced that by attaining communal bliss they would catalyze a global transformation of the human condition. Jennings thus discerns parallels between Cabet's tight-knit community of Icaria, the Zion built up by Shakers inspired by the millenarian doctrines of Ann Lee, the New Harmony that industrialist Robert Owen constructed on his Enlightenment blueprint for the New Moral World, and the Oneida Community of Perfectionists established by John Humphrey Noyes. Despite marked differences separating these utopian movements, Jennings prizes in all of them their distinctiveand utterly Americanoptimism in facing a future in which their adherents believed they would usher in a glorious new social order. Looking back over the decades since these movements all unraveled, Jennings laments that twenty-first-century America has lost the spark of hope that energized them. Tough-minded readers will hardly join Jennings in admiring these utopian dreamers. But readers who resent the constraints of a barren realism will value this deep-probing inquiry into the quest for new social possibilities.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)