Shocked by the suffering which the poor classes had experience as a result of the depression of , Ripley, a former Unitarian minster become transcendentalist, desired to create a community where thinkers and workers would join together and all would receive the same wages.
In April , the group established itself on acres, where they hoped to build a community in which both manual and intellectual labor would be respected and whose members could live a simple yet cultivated life. The soil was not rich but the association's members worked hard to cultivate it. Ripley decided that more organization was necessary, so the Fourier phalanx was adopted in , with the primary departments being agricultural, domestic, and mechanic arts.
Brook Farm failed because in its quest to become a self-sufficient, utopian society, a shift towards Fourierism caused financial hardships. The members of Brook Farm believed that they could create a utopian microcosm of society that would eventually serve as a model for and inaugurate the social macrocosm.
It was fully closed by Critics of the commune included Charles Lane, founder of another utopian community called Fruitlands…. Brook Farm. But the school failed because he asked students theological questions, and people thought it was disgraceful having children talk about the bible. He also asked them where babies came from, and this was considered outrageous. The most famous was the Brook Farm Phalanx, just outside of Boston.
While the Shakers, Owenites, and Fourierists all had intellectual roots in Europe, the most remarkable and, by many measures, the most successful utopian venture in American history was entirely homegrown. Thus, the dark mirror of utopias are dystopias—failed social experiments, repressive political regimes, and overbearing economic systems that result from utopian dreams put into practice.
Those who hated milking could do something else. Variety was also an important part of the work-plan: people regularly changed jobs to avoid boredom. The organizers tried to make the jobs as interesting as possible. For example, George Ripley's wife, Sophia Willard Dana Ripley, had reading stands attached to the ironing boards so that people could read as they ironed.
One of the things that made drudgery palatable was equal compensation. A child milking a cow was paid the same hourly rate as a former Harvard professor of Classics teaching in the school.
At a time when most were given little choice in the type or circumstance of their labor, and were frequently underpaid, Brook Farm was revolutionary. Neither social class, nor age, nor gender determined a member's community status or remuneration. Brook Farm came close to establishing gender equality, largely breaking the link between women and housekeeping.
This was accomplished, however, only because there were no households to keep. Most members were single and young. Men made up sixty percent of the community. Unmarried women enjoyed the same freedoms at Brook Farm that single women did in American society in general. There were few married couples and no provision for couples who had children out of infancy.
The lack of family units would have made Brook Farm hard to sustain in the long run. The residents were essentially transients, like students in a college, who departed after a short time to begin the next, and sometimes more domestic, phase of their lives. Most members, happy with the work allocation, found their new lives interesting and energizing.
John Van Der Zee Sears, a boarder at the Brook Farm school for most of his childhood, recounts in his memoirs that, "Men and women, boys and girls, drawn together in groups by special likings for the work to be done, made labor not only light but really pleasant. Annie Salisbury, an aspiring writer who had come to Brook Farm to free herself of materialism and seek spiritual enrichment, wrote in her diary in , "I think this present life gives me an antipathy to pen and ink.
In the midst of toil, or after a hard days work, my soul obstinately refuses to be burned out on paper. It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung heap, just as well as under a pile of money.
He was especially disheartened by the ubiquitous mounds of manure, to which Ripley invariably referred as the "gold mine. The majority of Brook Farmers thought the "idealistic tourists" lacked community spirit.
The school did well, but could not pay the expenses of the Farm, much less the cost of the aggressive building projects. The community built another building, the Nest, followed by three more: the Eyrie, the Cottage and the Pilgrim House. By there were over seventy people living at Brook Farm. Most of the new residents never fulfilled their investment pledges.
The association bore the cost of housing and boarding them without any additional capital. It was not in the nature of the visionaries and idealists who made up the community to be strict with prospective members or to be thrifty with the budget. Most were opposed to the idea of profit and disdained money and finance. This attitude, more than anything else, was responsible for the failure of Brook Farm to thrive.
Ripley could not afford to return the investment of the departed Hawthorne. He was having difficulty figuring out how anything was going to be paid for, even foodstuffs. Ripley realized that the "purely democratic, Christian principles on which he had established the community wouldn't provide even a single meal for seventy Brook Farmers living on a dairy farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts.
It had become one of the finest boarding schools in New England, with a teaching staff composed entirely of graduates of Harvard and Radcliffe. Its curriculum was a blend of the best classical education of the time and new methods. The school was so well respected that Harvard recommended it to students preparing for its college. As financial pressure mounted, another form of utopian organization, Fourierism, tempted Ripley.
France's Charles Fourier had a vision of meticulously planned cooperative communities called "phalanxes," in which social and commercial competition would be eliminated and which would provide a fulfilling existence for all its people. He believed that, in his system, the human predisposition toward community-mindedness would invariably, and without violence, master impulses toward individualism. Fourierism was brought to America by Albert Brisbane, whose manifesto, Social Destiny of Man , , excited Transcendentalists and other reformers.
During Ripley and his lieutenant at Brook Farm, Charles Dana, attended Fourierist meetings and came to believe that participation in the associationalist movement would provide Brook Farm with new members and financial support. Changes were gradually made in the community to increase financial responsibility and to bring it more in line with Fourierist principles. In early , not without opposition, the elected officers of Brook Farm voted to reorganize as a Fourierist phalanx.
This included new bureaucratic procedures, described by a lexicon of "scientific" terms like "rigid inquisition," "proper authorities," and "bureau of internal affairs. In the domestic group, for example, the series included waiting, ironing, washing, and cooking.
This level of formality departed greatly from Ripley's initial vision.
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