Dorothy Ross has written of the “transforming enthusiasm of the early eighties” when “evangelical, liberal, and socialist impulses converged on the desire for a more egalitarian and fraternal order.” Most of the young intellectuals who spoke of “socialism,” as Ross explains, understood it to mean “the principle of association or cooperation in economic and political life.” It was the opposite of individualism, which meant the pursuit of self interest, unrestrained by considerations for society as a whole. Definitions of socialism were varied enough to include “the voluntary efforts of workingmen to combine into cooperative industries as well as efforts of the state to control economic activity on behalf of all classes.” With such an elastic meaning, the banner of socialism was lifted by reformers all across the country.48
This helps us to understand why, as Daniel T. Rodgers explains, there could be a pronounced harmony of interest among reformers hawking all manner of apparently competing solutions. They were united in a common quest by “a vivid sense of exploitation,” as he puts it. One of Bellamy’s biographers describes the era as “a period of feeling about for a good social order,” a time when rival social reformers were more drawn together by their common outrage rather than separated by their differing social philosophies. Henry George’s biographer writes of the many threads of reform that were being woven into a common design. “The Henry George impulse,” Charles Barker explains, “interfiliated with other impulses. . . . Such a cross-connecting . . . was never more natural than during . . . the last quarter of the nineteenth century.” With deep faith in his own political economy, George himself deplored the union of disparate ideas. But with no such fixed intellectual anchor, Gaston and his associates read and learned from Bellamy, George, Gronlund, and others, drawing inspiration and insight from all of them, all the while choosing freely what suited them best.49
At some point the club members shifted the focus from ideas to action. What could be done? They had reached agreement about what was wrong, and they were getting closer to a vision of what a reconstructed nation might look like. They were clear about the need for a more caring, cooperative society, one that would nurture individual expression and achievement as it looked to the common welfare. But what might a few individual reformers do to stem the onslaught of greed and chart a new course for their country? Could they be more than thoughtful observers and vigilant critics of their society? Were they foolish to think it really possible for a few ordinary citizens to make a difference in the historical process? How could one make a difference? What options did America offer?
The labor movement and the political process were the two most obvious ones. Gaston was strongly drawn to the Knights of Labor, now twenty years old and beginning to recede from the crest of its influence. Like Henry George, who had joined the Knights in 1883, Gaston lauded the view of land as “the natural source of wealth” and “the heritage of all the people.” As the nation’s most influential organization of working men and women, the Knights championed the same “religion of solidarity” emphasized by Bellamy and the same belief in the evolution of natural cooperation favored by George. Opposing inequality and exploitation in American life, especially disparate wage scales for women, child labor abuses, and discrimination against blacks, the Knights pointed the way to a cooperative commonwealth by favoring the eight-hour day, a graduated income tax, and public ownership of such “natural monopolies” as railroads, telephones, and telegraphs. The famous Knights’ declaration that “an injury to one is the concern of all” expressed a value system that stood in stark contrast to the acquisitive, competitive individualism of the emerging corporate state.50
Gaston sympathized with the Knights’ concept of a cooperative society but he sensed it was not enough, at least not for him, and so he looked elsewhere for what he hoped would be a more comprehensive way of advancing the ideas he and his friends had been studying. He had been active in local politics since his university days, but at the end of the 1880s he seems not to have considered politics a hopeful avenue to reform. He had not joined either the Greenback Party or the Union Labor Party, the two radical alternatives available to him. Instead, he remained a member of the Republican Party, but he grew increasingly disillusioned both with its retreat from its former idealism and with the American political system in general.51
REJECTING BOTH POLITICS AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT as the forums for their reformist impulses, Gaston and, his friends found the direction they were seeking in the country’s rich communitarian tradition. Here they found what they believed would be a practical means of putting their ideas into practice.
For at least a century dissatisfied and idealistic Americans, men and women with utopian dreams and bold plans, had tried out their ideas in experimental communities. They had created self-contained societies set apart from the larger world, established as a haven for themselves and as models of what the larger society might become. Some of these communities, like New Harmony and Brook Farm, had become internationally famous demonstrations of the ideas of Robert Owen and of Charles Fourier, the two most prominent theoreticians of communitarian socialism. These and other pre-Civil War experiments were inspirations to many of Gaston’s contemporaries. They believed that such experiments were especially relevant in the 1880s. The idea of “reform by nucleation,” as one historian puts it, “held promise for a new generation of reformers.” 52 Albert Brisbane, a follower of Fourier and one of the most famous of the antebellum communitarians, had expressed the hope of communitarinism this way: “The reform we contemplate . . . will change quietly and by substitution what is false and defective. ... It can moreover be tried on a small scale, and it will only spread when practice has shown its superiority over the present system.” 53
Gaston probably made no count of the number of communitarian experiments that had been tried, and scholars today differ in their estimates, but a cautious historian might hazard that over two hundred had been established in the previous hundred years. Reading the reform press and exchanging letters with community builders in other parts of the country, Gaston was excited by accounts of new efforts. His own age, he believed, was wonderfully suited for a new flowering of the communitarian tradition.54
Two colonies emerging from the ferment of that decade particularly appealed to Gaston, and the Investigating Club studied them carefully. The first was the Credit Foncier of Sinaloa, founded in 1886 by Albert Kimsey Owen at Topolobampo Bay on the west coast of Mexico. Based on a plan called “integral cooperation,” Owen’s colony combined influences of Fourier and his French disciple, Jean-Baptiste André Godin, with his own swashbuckling socialism. Owen dreamed of servicing freight and passenger traffic from the United States to China by creating a great Pacific City as the terminus of a transcontinental railroad. He won financial backing from the Kansas socialist millionaire Christian B. Hoffman and journalistic support from the feminist novelist and communitarian reformer Marie Howland and her husband, Edward Howland. The appeal of Topolobampo to Gaston—at least the description of what it was to be that he read in Owen’s book Integral Cooperation—is easy to understand. In these pages he learned of the plans for achieving harmony and equality through socialized production and distribution, cooperative housekeeping and child rearing, broad avenues and spacious public parks—a perfect integration of architecture and ideology that would blossom in a rich intellectual and cultural life. Gaston never went to Topolobampo, but he learned later of a reality that was painfully different from the dream. Primitive physical facilities
