Stirpiculture

MY FATHER'S HOUSE--Pierrepont B.

Noyes--Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50).

Communism was once rife in the U. S., but not the sort preached by Earl Browder and William Zebulon Foster. A religious, not a political belief, communism was attempted in 62 U. S. communities during the 19th Century, from Massachusetts' Brook Farm to Indiana's New Harmony.

Strangest of U. S. social experiments, these communist groups are now vaguely remembered as something between a co-operative and a free-love colony. Most suc cessful, most notorious of all communist experiments was the Oneida Community, scene of the "world's one great experiment in human eugenics." The subject of many a historical sidelight, Oneida Community last week filled the background of an auto biography written by one of its "eugenic" descendants, whose father, John Humphrey Noyes, founded and led the Community for more than 30 years in the light of "scientific propagation and true Christian Communism."

Graduating from Yale Theological Seminary in 1833, redheaded, fanatic John Noyes barnstormed New England preaching "Perfectionism," collected a colony of 38 men and 53 women to start off the Oneida venture, which began in a log house in 1847. Four years later membership had jumped to 205 (peak membership: 300), and the world was cocking an eye at these scandalous "free lovers" who called their goings-on "stirpiculture." Within the Community, eugenically weak males struck at the favoritism shown their betters, got a skim-milk ruling that they could father one child. The favored, select, few "stirps" took the cream. Work was planned collectively, law & order in the same way. Noting the failure of similar groups throughout the country, to make ends meet by straight farming, Noyes and his shrewd, God-fearing colleagues turned to canning fruits and vegetables, manufactured the world-famed Newhouse steel trap, made silk, plated silverware, did a big tourist trade in vegetable dinners.

At Author Noyes's birth Oneida Community, then 22 years old, was a going concern, its ways natural and agreeable to its colonists.' At walking age he was turned over to the communal nursery--the Drawing Room--was matched for signs of improvement over Outside breeds. His childhood he remembers as a happy time, clouded only with infrequent "criticisms." Meals were tasty and generous, the Bible was made a friendly, interesting book; the spacious brick Mansion House, the workshops and farm were rich exploring grounds, the grown-ups gave Gilbert & Sullivan operas, the children felt important doing part-time work making trap chains. It was not until he was 6 or 7 that he got a taste of Outside opinion from town boys who called them "Christ boys'' and "bastards." In the next few years the Outside closed in savagely. Stirpiculture seemed to the Community's neighbors no better than turpitude. In 1879, when Noyes was 9, his father fled to Canada to escape the clergy's clamor for his hide. His successor managed badly, quarrels split the Community, and shortly afterward Leader Noyes proclaimed from Canada a New Stirpicultural Policy: get married. Secularism, thus unleashed, ran its course.

From a 100% communist enterprise, where even clothing was not personally owned, the Community became a joint-stock company, its members fanatics of private property. H. G. Wells, visiting there in 1906, commented: "It was difficult to borrow a hammer." Founder Noyes never returned from his exile, but his son, gradually acclimatized to harsh Outside realities, returned to a tottering Oneida when he was 25, succeeded in putting the Community back on a paying basis (Community Plate). Still there at 67, Author Noyes casts many a wistful backward glance to the days before "the Oneida Community, by adopting the family system, had taken a first step backward, away from communism."

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