PETER: If you look in your kitchen cabinet, there's a decent chance that your knives, forks, and spoons were made by a company called Oneida. There's something that sets this silverware apart from other brands, the Oneida Corporation grew out of one of the most radical utopian experiments in the 19th century, a religious commune known as the Oneida Community.
ED: Established in 1848 by self-styled preacher named John Humphrey Noyes, the Oneida Community flourished for three decades. Molly Jessup is a historian who works at the Oneida Mansion House, a sprawling 93,000-square-foot complex that the community built for its members in Upstate New York. She says that Noyes considered himself a religious perfectionist, that meant that Christians could be free from sin in their lifetime. In fact, they could create paradise on earth.
MOLLY JESSUP: He developed this social program of Bible Communism to prepare perfect society.
BRIAN: Boy, I've heard of the Communist Manifesto, but Bible Communism? That surely is not a phrase you hear everyday.
ED: No, I have to admit that it's not, Brian. I could try to explain it for you, but instead, let's let Molly Jessup do that for us.
MOLLY JESSUP: Bible Communism was an idea that they should live in a manner similar to the apostles and the first Christians, as one family sharing all things. They believed that the worst thing that people could be was selfish, so that you should be as selfless as possible in all things that you did.
ED: That all sounds pretty virtuous, but Jessup says that Noyes' view on sharing did not include only property, but reached into personal relationships. We should probably say, if you have young children listening, we're going to be talking about some adult issues for the next few minutes, because members of the Oneida Community shared each other in a practice known as complex marriage.
MOLLY JESSUP: It's not just men who would have multiple wives, but women who would in theory have multiple husbands. These ideas were quite controversial, as you can imagine. Society tended to value piety and purity in women, so the fact that you would have a community that would say, "Sex is a rite of worship, it's an experience meant to be enjoyed, and there shouldn't be stigma for having multiple sexual partners," is certainly shocking to a lot of people.
ED: This is actually fairly highly regulated, right? Can you explain what these relationships would look like in practice?
MOLLY JESSUP: Oh, yes. For their physical relationships, again, they viewed sex as a rite of worship. So if someone was interested in setting up what they called a social interview with someone else, you would go to an intermediary, usually a member of the central counsel, and you would ask them to find out if the potential partner's also interested in you. If they were, the intermediary could set up a time and a place for you all to meet. And if the person wasn't interested, people in this community did have the option of saying, "No, I'm not interested." Which again, is pretty revolutionary compared to marriages outside of the community, where a woman was often viewed as her husband's property.
ED: I don't want to be sacrilegious, but this sounds a little bit like Tinder, doesn't it? Here you have an elder who says, "You both have swiped in the same direction, we would arrange that."
MOLLY JESSUP: Yes, I think so. It is very much what we would term today a sex-positive community, where they thought there shouldn't be shame or hesitation in sexual relationships. In their social interview process though, they would also discourage you from spending the night with someone after sexual intercourse. They were concerned about you developing that sticky or special love, as they called it, that would lead to monogamous feelings towards someone.
ED: Did this breed a lot of happiness, or unhappiness, or some combination of both?
MOLLY JESSUP: I would certainly say there's a combination of happiness and unhappiness, depending on who the people are. You do have another example, of Victor Holly and Mary Ryan, who fell in love with each other, wanted to have a monogamous relationship, couldn't have that in the community, and eventually seceded and left the community to be married. Eventually, there were 300 people there, so you can imagine that there's a range of motivations for why they were in the community. There's a range of what their experiences were like there, and you have people who realize it's not for them, and they secede on their own.
ED: With all these regulated social interviews, what was the role of reproduction in that?
MOLLY JESSUP: For the first 20 years of the community, they didn't have many children. They practiced a form of birth control known as male continence. In this form of birth control, men are supposed to stop themselves before they reach climax. Men in this community were the ones who were responsible for birth control. There were always children in the community, because people joined as families, and there were a few unexpected blessings every year. The community decided to have children in 1869, and at that point, they were very interested in science, they were interested in whether or not spirituality could be a genetically transmitted trait. So they began a program that they called stirpiculture, and you could think of it as a spiritual eugenics. The children born in that time period are called stirpicults.
ED: Stirpicults, did that phrase catch on?
MOLLY JESSUP: I think the Oneida Community are the only ones who use it, a word unique to them.
ED: Once the children were born, what did stirpiculture look like in raising children?
MOLLY JESSUP: Throughout the Oneida Community's existence, children were raised communally. Just like they were worried about sticky or special love between adults in exclusive relationships, they were worried about the selfish love a mother might have towards her own biological child. Like a woman might be criticized for the sin of philoprogenitive-ness, which would be loving your child more than you loved all community children.
ED: I hate it when that happens. What is actually sustaining this organization? It sounds large, I know they flourish, how do they combine these radical ideas of social relations with something that allows them to succeed financially?
MOLLY JESSUP: Although they practiced Bible Communism, they were actually pretty good capitalists. Their major industry during the religious community was metal animal traps, and they used the money from animal traps to diversify the other things that they did. They also dyed silk thread, they had fruit canning, and at their Connecticut branch, they started to make spoons.
ED: People have heard of Oneida as a trademark today. How did we go from this perfectionist community to something that people recognize in the consumer market today?
MOLLY JESSUP: It was the community themselves who voted to disband in 1880. One reason, there was a lot of internal dissension about leadership. A second reason, having children really created nuclear families within this larger whole. And the third reason was that they were facing a lot of outside pressure and criticism of their institution of complex marriage. They wanted to continue to run their successful businesses to benefit former members, so they became a joint stock company in 1881. As they moved towards the 20th century, they assessed the market and where things were going, and decided that silverware was going to be their best bet forward.
ED: Better than animal traps?
MOLLY JESSUP: Better than animal traps. So they looked at this emerging market of young women getting married, and needing to buy silverware, and decided-
ED: That's pretty ironic, isn't it?
MOLLY JESSUP: Right, yeah. To go all-in on silverware for young married people. So they sold the animal trap business in 1924, and they focused on silverware throughout the 20th century. The factory that they built in the 1860s is still operational today, it's about a mile from the Mansion House, and there's actually descendants of the Oneida Community who still live in the Mansion House.
ED: Wow. Only in America, you really have to believe, don't you think?
MOLLY JESSUP: Right.
ED: Molly Jessup is Curator of Education at the Oneida Community Mansion House in Oneida, New York.