Whatever may be said of his
quaint attempts to reduce society to a common denominator, it is
certain that his arrival in America, at a time when people's
minds were open to all sorts of economic suggestions, had a
stimulating effect upon labor reforms and led, in the course of
time, to the founding of some forty communistic colonies, most of
them in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. "We are all a little
wild here with numberless projects of social reform," wrote
Emerson to Thomas Carlyle; "not a reading man but has the draft
of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." One of these
experiments, at Red Bank, New Jersey, lasted for thirteen years,
and another, in Wisconsin, for six years. But most of them after
a year or two gave up the struggle.
Of these failures, the best known is Brook Farm, an intellectual
community founded in 1841 by George Ripley at West Roxbury,
Massachusetts. Six years later the project was abandoned and is
now remembered as an example of the futility of trying to leaven
a world of realism by means of an atom of transcendental
idealism. In a sense, however, Brook Farm typifies this period of
transition. It was a time of vagaries and longings. People seemed
to be conscious of the fact that a new social solidarity was
dawning. It is not strange, therefore, that--while the railroads
were feeling their way from town to town and across the prairies,
while water-power and steam-power were multiplying man's
productivity, indicating that the old days were gone forever--
many curious dreams of a new order of things should be dreamed,
nor that among them some should be ridiculous, some fantastic,
and some unworthy, nor that, as the futility of a universal
social reform forced itself upon the dreamers, they merged the
greater in the lesser, the general in the particular, and sought
an outlet in espousing some specific cause or attacking some
particular evil.
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