Another thrilling episode of Utopia Road!
Nauvoo is perched on a bend in the Mississippi river. The secular town is on the bluff safe from the river. The 19th Century Mormon town is on the flat, surrounded on three sides by the River, which flooded extensively in early 2008, on the Iowa side this time.
Mormons settled here when it was the frontier in their search for the New Jerusalem and built a substantial community, but as the River carried more traffic they found Nauvoo was not isolated enough for their practices, and so moved further west.
There was a fraternity of sorts among the founders and would-be founders of new communities on the American frontier. They knew or knew of each other and some corresponded. Robert Owen, for example, exchanged letters with Fanny Wright when she set up Nashoba in Tennessee. When Ètienne Cabet was in St. Louis after the Texas land purchase he had negotiated from France fell through he contacted the Mormons in Nauvoo just up the River, or rather the Mormon agent in St. Louis who was looking for a buyer for the Nauvoo site. Cabet bought it, the land, the buildings, and some of the livestock and feed.
His merry band decamped St. Louis and moved into the readymade winter proof community at Nauvoo. The Icarians prospered materially in Nauvoo, rich farming land (thanks all the silt dropped there by floods of the River), supportive neighbors – including other Europeans – and ready access to market on the River. But they argued among themselves, as always, and eventually split. Some stayed in Nauvoo and shed the Icarian manner (see the “c” word in the next paragraph), others went back to St. Louis, and still others, including Cabet himself, briefly, went on to Corning Iowa, on that more later.
On this visit, the county museum in Nauvoo was open and I paid a visit. The docent showed me the Icarian material, much of which was numbered. She told me the numbers referred to individuals. Ergo a school chair with a “29” engraved on it belonged to child 29. Hardly. This is an example of the systematic avoidance of the “c” word in the United States. Among the Icarians there was no private property, not even clothes, in Nauvoo. If everything was numbered it was to keep track of community property. They called themselves communists, though none had heard of Karl Marx.
Avoiding the “c” word has led to some odd results. In the 1950s the Major League Baseball franchise in Cincinnati Ohio changed its name from the Cincinnati Reds to the Cincinnati Red Legs. The “red” was the colour of the uniforms, not the book they carried. (Nary a word about this on the franchise’s extensive web side these days.) Why? Well no one wanted to cheer on the Reds! It did not take by the way and I doubt anyone ever cheered on the Red Legs and today the team is again just the Reds.