Yesterday’s post featured a successful entrepreneur (Walt Disney) whose Utopian community failed to come to fruition. Today I am looking at a Utopian community which grew into a successful corporate enterprise, almost despite itself. And here I am talking about Oneida, the New York-based silverware company (see second image for vintage silverware photo). And incongruously, free love with multiple sexual partners was involved.
In 1848, the minister John Humphrey Noyes founded the Oneida Community with a take on Christianity that was popular in the mid-19th century, when many believers thought that Jesus Christ had already come back to earth in 70 CE. For Noyes, this “Perfectionism” line of thought meant that it was possible to live sin-free and to set up a Kingdom of God on earth.
Well, Noyes reasoned, in heaven there is no selfishness and no possessiveness — and thus he wanted his members to rid themselves of those qualities in their relationships. So babies in the Oneida community stayed with their mothers for a year and a half, and then they were raised by the community. Also, since Angels had sex (Noyes reasoned), and Angels were good, sex was good too.
Noyes wrote that “sexual love is not naturally restricted to pairs,” and thought that women and men should be able to have non-exclusive sexual relationships, a.k.a., swinging. He thought that jealousy was a sort of “sticky love,” and tried to prevent it. For instance, he told one possessive lover: “I do not wish you to forget her, nor to love her less. But cannot you love her without claiming her?” In fact, he would break up sexual partners if he thought they were getting too emotionally attached to one another.
In terms of business, the community embraced both elements of communism and capitalism. The free-love commune fell apart after Noyes died in 1886, but one of his sons began Oneida Ltd, and made sure every employee earned a living wage, and returned half the year’s profits to be distributed equally among the Oneida workers.
The descendants of Oneida eventually became ashamed of their community’s sexual history, burning all their documents in 1947.
