Patient readers will find a short video at the end of the text. Do the reading first and come to the video prepared to discuss the assignment!
I had the opportunity to make another field trip to Utopia Road in October 2008. “Utopia Road” is a figurative reference, but this time there was a literal example, for that: stay tuned.
Visiting the remnants of utopia communities is a window into the past but also a window into how the past is preserved and communicated. I have visited some places more than once to see how things change, and sometimes they do change. An art critic sees “Swan Lake” more than once. An avid reader reads War and Peace more than once, I know I have. The archaeologist keeps digging at the same site. A keen student of utopia revisits places, too.
These visits make real the circumstances that these theory-into-practice people had in a way that Google Street View can never do, though I use Google Street View as often as possible. I rented a satellite navigator this time, and that emboldened me at times, confident in the knowledge that the navigator would direct me back to the Interstate or the motel. (In previous explorations, in the best Lewis and Clark tradition, I have been hopelessly lost in the dead of night unable to find the hotel. No more, I hope.)
Visits to the sites also brings home the effort made. Buildings were built to last and some have. The durability is palpable, as is something of the scale of the exercises, some modest, just a single building at Oneida, and others sizeable, like Nauvoo.
I started with a visit to the grave of Ètienne Cabet in St. Louis. I have been there before but with the move to digital, I found I had lost the photographs, and since I had an another reason to be in St. Louis (to visit the Utopian Collection at the Mercantile Library of the University of Missouri at St Louis) I took the time to go to the New St. Marcus Cemetery again.
Cabet’s followers were Icarians, after the title of his book, which advocates a communism of property: from each according to ability, to each according to need. Wikipedia offers a starting point to anyone who wants to know more about Cabet and his kind.
One of the things that is noteworthy about the preservation of the legacy of such utopia endeavors in the United States is how the word “communism” is almost never used. On that more later.