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To the great scandal of some, under the scarcely less reproving eyes of others, raising its weight of wings, your liberty.
—André Breton, Ode to Charles Fourier
In the first part, before the dogs came, I explored the ruins of Llano del Rio: a utopian colony founded in 1914 by socialist lawyer and almost mayor of Los Angeles Job Harriman. We’ll get to him. That led us back in time to Charles Fourier, an eccentric and possibly mad Frenchman whose strange ideas galvanized a wave of utopian experiments across America in the 1840s.
The dogs, in case you had doubts.
Fourier died in Paris in 1837. Less than a decade later, there were at least thirty Fourierist “phalanxes” spread across the United States. And the man responsible for this was a disciple and utopian propagandist named Albert Brisbane.
Brisbane was born in upstate New York near Rochester to a wealthy landowning family. He ended up studying at Humboldt University in Berlin, where he was quickly seduced, as Americans in Europe have been for centuries, by socialism. Specifically, he became interested in the ideas of Henri de Saint-Simon, another – the other – early “utopian socialist”. I won’t go into Saint-Simon here. Suffice to say, we ended up living in his world, not Fourier’s.
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Brisbane quickly broke with Saint-Simonianism. Hunting around for a new belief system, he came across a treatise by Fourier and immediately packed his bags, traveling to Paris to seek out the master himself. Fourier invited the American into his circle, and Brisbane became a true believer. In his wife’s biography of him, which is, confusingly, mostly his own autobiography, he writes of his discovery:
These views of Fourier produced a great revolution in my mind. The darkness which had rested on human destiny was dissipated; light began to shine in. In the application of law to the social organism I saw an invariable guide for the mind in the great work of social reconstruction; I saw a scientific certainty taking the place of all the blind, futile efforts of human reason which had so long failed in its legislative work. This was the first gleam of intellectual satisfaction which had come to me.
Upon returning home, he published one of the first major American utopian treatises, synthesizing Fourier’s writings with his own, far less developed ideas. It was called The Social Destiny of Man.
It reads like a sermon, a distilled-for-American-tastebuds version of Fourierism with heavy religious undertones that Fourier himself never suggested, and would probably be appalled by:
Association will establish Christianity practically upon Earth. It will make the love of God and the love of the neighbor the greatest desire, and the practice of all men. Temptation to wrong will be taken from the paths of men, and a thousand perverting and degrading circumstances and influences will be purged from the social world.
Fourier believed all human desires were natural and could be integrated into a harmonious society. Brisbane had scarcely left Paris and was already in the business of replacing those with a single desire. He knew his audience wasn’t exactly the Parisian intellectual elite – though to be fair, Fourier’s audience in Paris wasn’t exactly that, either – and when he wrote about making “the love of the neighbor the greatest desire”, you can see how far he’d departed from Fourier already. Unless that was code for polygamy, which Brisbane took to later, albeit privately (and without the consent of his wives).
Brisbane is an archetype we’ll encounter in America again and again: the enterprising upstart who travels abroad, encounters strange new ideas, then returns home and repackages them for domestic consumption, adding some of his own special sauce for good measure. Replace Fourierism with Buddhism/Hinduism and the cycle practically repeats itself play by play in the 1960s counterculture, with Alan Watts or any number of others standing in for Brisbane.
Popularizing Fourier’s ideas was made easier by the fact that Brisbane wasn’t building the American socialist utopian project from scratch. The foundations had already been laid by another man: Robert Owen, who launched the first wave of American experimental communities in the 1820s as the father of a movement called Owenism. Your neighborhood grocery co-op, if you’re lucky enough to have one of those, is a distant relative of this movement. As is Mondragon, the largest and most successful cooperative business in the world.
Unlike Fourier, Owen took a swing at utopia with money in his pockets and a willingness to get his hands dirty.
New Lanark, New Harmony
A self-made textile entrepreneur from Wales who came of age working in the rapidly industrializing mills of Manchester, Owen was an intellectually curious, industrious character who genuinely cared for the welfare of workers. Though he had little formal education, he developed his heavily Enlightenment-colored moral views as a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.
In 1799 Owen and a few partners bought the New Lanark Mill outside Glasgow. Having first-hand experience of the brutal factory conditions of the time, he resolved to run New Lanark on more enlightened principles. He began slowly instituting a series of reforms that were revolutionary, including shorter workdays (he coined the slogan “Eight hours’ labour, Eight hours’ recreation, Eight hours’ rest” at a time when 16-hour days were the norm), continuing education for employees, and free schools for their children.
At the time, many factories operated a truck system (which will rear its ugly head later in America’s utopian colonies) – instead of being paid real money, workers were compensated in tokens that were only good for purchases from the factory store. These were notorious for selling shoddy merchandise at highly inflated prices. Owen pioneered the co-op model when he instituted a truck shop at New Lanark that sold quality goods at near cost, passing on the savings to his employees.
There have been plenty of socialists who inherited massive fortunes accumulated by unrepentant capitalists, but as far as I’m aware, Owen is the only real example of a successful industrialist who evolved into a socialist during the course of actually running a profitable factory. Needless to say, his pro-worker stance caused him endless problems with his partners. When they protested that his social reforms were costing them too much money, Owen bought them out, outmaneuvered an attempt by his board to auction off the mill, and brought on a new set of partners more amenable to his ideas (including Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism).
The mill, incidentally, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site housing a lovely hotel.
New Lanark became renowned throughout Europe as an example of how a successful factory could be run without sacrificing the well-being of its workers. Among the many statesmen and reformers who visited the mill was future Tsar Nicholas I of Russia (one wonders what lessons he took from it, since he went on to become one of Europe’s most reactionary autocrats). But despite making huge strides in improving the lot of his workers, Owen kept bumping up against the limits of what was possible under industrial capitalism and within the structure of a for-profit company. So in late 1824, learning that the town of Harmony, Indiana had been put up for sale, he packed his bags and together with one of his sons and a Scottish friend improbably named Donald McDonald boarded a ship for America. There, he planned on putting his ideas into practice without the compromises and obstacles he’d faced at New Lanark. He would purchase Harmony and use it as the foundation for a functioning model society based on the principles of cooperation.
Because of his widely-publicized success with New Lanark and his reputation in reformist circles, Owen was greeted with interest on arrival in America. He deftly leveraged his reputation to gain access to members of the highest echelons of government. After purchasing the town of Harmony and renaming it the New Harmony Community of Equality, he set out on a massive promotional tour. He even addressed Congress to outline his utopian vision. The audience for his speeches, if you can believe it, included five U.S. presidents (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and the President-elect, John Quincy Adams). These were almost certainly the first discussions of socialism (in practice if not in name, since the term hadn’t entered wider circulation yet) in the Americas, and at the highest imaginable level.
Unfortunately for Owen and for the rest of us, those speeches marked the high point of his American experiment. Because after investing the bulk of his fortune in New Harmony, things started to go wrong almost immediately.
Unlike New Lanark, where he’d methodically and gradually introduced reforms into a functioning system, New Harmony was a blank slate. He’d purchased the shell of a town complete with houses, agricultural fields, and some light industrial infrastructure, but it had no community aside from a few caretakers. The purpose of his promotional tour was to recruit residents. And in that, at least, he was successful – almost to a fault. When he returned to New Harmony in April, its population had already grown to more than 800 people. His son, who oversaw the township in its early months while his father was away recruiting, later described the members of the community as “a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in.”
New Harmony’s trajectory foreshadowed the fate of the Fourierist colonies that were to come. Within two years, it collapsed into infighting and factionalism before Owen declared the experiment over. But the town and many members remained, and some of its utopian ideas carried on. So maybe there’s another way of looking at it – not as a failure, but as an “exit to reality”. An experiment that tested the boundaries of what society could be, discovering new ground in one direction, impenetrable walls in another, and then disbanded, leaving behind a redrawn map of the possible. Or as John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community (sex colony turned flatware producing powerhouse) put it:
We made a raid into an unknown country, charted it, and returned without the loss of a single man, woman, or child.
Owen bequeathed his interest in the town to his sons, who stayed in America, and returned to the United Kingdom, where he remained active as a social reformer and godfather of the nascent cooperative movement. He died penniless in 1858.
Oh, remember Fourier’s designs for his phalanstery?
This was how Owen envisioned New Harmony:
The two men never met, but they were separately working out their ideas for what a model society might look like at roughly the same time, in the opening decades of the 19th century. There’s no evidence to suggest they read each other’s work, but it’s impossible to ignore the similarities of their pastoral industrial estates.
With the Western world undergoing a transition from the field to the factory, maybe it was all just in the air. How else to picture harmony, a resolution to these seemingly opposed ways of organizing society and production, than as an idyllic synthesis of both?
Time for Association
The end of New Harmony leaves a utopia-shaped void in the American public’s imagination until Albert Brisbane returns from France and starts publishing books and articles espousing Fourier’s ideas with the intensity of a graphomaniac.
What happens next is unclear. By some accounts, he’s introduced to a man named Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune (and later congressman), who takes to him immediately and offers him a column where he can expound on Fourierism to his heart’s content. By other accounts, it’s Brisbane who seeks out Greeley and pays him a sum of $500 for the right to publish a front-page column in the Tribune. Whichever it was, the result is that by 1842, a short 15 years after the failure of New Harmony, Brisbane is pitching Fourierism – specifically the concept of “Association” – to the American public from the front page of one of the country’s preeminent newspapers. And America seems primed to hear him out.
Brook Farm might be the most well-known utopian commune of the 1840s, thinly fictionalized in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. Founded just outside Boston by Transcendentalists, and counting Hawthorne as one of its first (though reluctant) members, it’s a great example of the strange way in which homegrown self-reliance became mixed with Brisbane’s version of Fourierism.
Transcendentalism was a movement of spiritual and literary individualists who believed in the primacy of personal experience over received dogma, in the divine not being outside of this world but an integral part of its fabric. Think Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller. Brook Farm was meant to be a place where these ideas could be embodied in day to day communal life.
And it functioned this way for a few years, imperfectly but reliably, until Brisbane’s Fourierism started to permeate the wider culture. Then things took a turn.
By 1844, interest in Fourierism had reached its zenith. It seemed like every week a new phalanx was popping up somewhere inspired by Brisbane’s newspaper columns, often with little to no capital and members utterly inexperienced in the day-to-day realities of self-sufficiency. An organization was established called – I’m not making this up – the General Association for the Friends of Association in the United States. At the founding convention, its members promptly dismiss Fourier’s more unconventional ideas and commit to building what can only be described as a communitarian bureaucracy, a “Union of Associations” to coordinate the efforts of the newly formed phalanxes.
It was around this time that Fourierism found its way to quiet Brook Farm, where the community of transcendentalist individualists promptly and somewhat inexplicably rebranded as a phalanx. And then they committed the cardinal mistake, the Fourierist kiss of death: they embarked on the construction of a phalanstery.
The project subsumed everything else. Quality of life on the farm deteriorated and the atmosphere became charged and unpleasant. There was food rationing. Staples like coffee and tea disappeared from the dinner table. Everyone got smallpox. But construction on the phalanstery doggedly continued, in a desperate race against time to complete the thing that would supposedly make the rest of Fourierism magically work. In 1846, just as it was nearing completion, it burned to the ground.
Most other phalansteries didn’t meet such spectacular ends, because they were never built. The few that were consumed capital and resources that could’ve been put to better practical use elsewhere, and accelerated the dissolution of the communities that constructed them. If the Fourierist mania of the 1840s taught future utopians anything, it was to think long and hard before making a monumental and impractical structure the centerpiece of their project.
Sensing American Fourierism spiraling, or maybe out of an awareness of having thoroughly perverted Fourier’s teachings, Brisbane, at the height of his influence as the figurehead of Association, packed his bags again and absconded to Paris. His stated reason was that he needed to “do more research”, maybe trying to figure out where he went wrong (he also wanted to learn to play music and embark on a study of embryology, apparently). But the effect was that without his symbolic leadership and guidance – and most importantly, without his regular newspaper columns promoting it – Fourierism fizzled.
Returning to America after his trip and surveying the failing phalanxes of Association, he washed his hands of it all:
I thought that if one Association could be successfully started it would serve as a model which would attract all classes to the idea as soon as its advantages were made known. I expected of course that some years would pass over before such an undertaking could be realized as the result of an ardent propagation; but when the little experiments were begun and rushed incoherently without means and without knowledge, finally failing, I saw that there was no hope for success in the practical field. These failures had discredited the idea in the minds of the people; and so many false opinions and so many prejudices had been aroused, that I felt it was hopeless to begin anew.
Finally, inevitably, he turned on Fourier himself, despite the man having died a decade earlier:
I said to myself: “If ever a man deserved to be hanged for intellectual rashness and violence, it is Fourier!”
Ending the chapter of his life devoted to the project of Association, Brisbane went on to travel throughout Europe, exploring esoteric subjects like animal magnetism and the culture of the vine (wine), along with regular visits to the continent’s insane asylums:
I witnessed many other strange phenomena in the different insane asylums of Europe which I always visited with profound interest. A singular fact connected with such visits was that after having spent three or four hours in those institutions I imagined every one crazy about me when I came out.
He tried his hand as an inventor, sinking time and money into a failed project to bring a vacuum oven to market, and married several times. Sometimes his wives overlapped, resulting in accusations of bigamy. It seems the one part of Fourierism that really stuck for him (despite leaving it out of his Americanized version) was the omnigamy.
Looking Backward
Most of the Fourierist experiments in America ended by the 1850s, and the Civil War wiped out any remaining popular utopian sentiment for a long time. But, like a brood of cicadas, the ideas stayed underground, dormant, waiting for their moment. And that moment came at the height of the Gilded Age with Edward Bellamy’s publication of a novel called Looking Backward in 1888. It went on to sell more than a million copies and became a cultural phenomenon.
Bellamy, like Brisbane, spent part of his youth studying in Germany. So we can guess what that means. He later worked as a journalist and trained as a lawyer before turning to literature, seeing little success until Looking Backward.
It has to be said upfront: Looking Backward is a bad novel, in the same way that Atlas Shrugged is a bad novel. Both belong to a long tradition of sociopolitical manifestos masquerading as fiction that stretches all the way back to Plato. But that hardly matters. It managed to do something few books ever do – to tap into the zeitgeist so exactly that any shortcomings of the work were liquified by the sheer force of its arrival in the culture.
The story goes something like this: Julian West, a wealthy young conservative living in Boston in 1887, is having trouble sleeping. He builds himself a sound-proof bedroom in his basement and hires a hypnotist to help him fall asleep. And sleep he does. For more than a century.
What follows is basically the plot of Encino Man: A retired physician, Dr. Leete, discovers our man during an excavation underneath what is now his house, and rouses West from his 113-year slumber. He then proceeds to introduce him to the United States of the year 2000 (as well as his pretty daughter).
The rest of the book is description after description of the strange new world West finds himself in. There was no violent revolution in America. Capitalist monopolies grew and grew until they were all nationalized. Money has been replaced by government-issued debit cards, and everyone, regardless of their job, gets allocated the same amount of credits, eliminating poverty and inequality. Industry has been militarized: young people get conscripted into the labor pool once they turn 21, and at 24 – Starship Troopers style – they’re assigned a career based on universal aptitude testing. You’re free to retrain, but once you hit 45, you have to retire.
There are no retail stores, no banks, no political parties, and no labor unions. Everything you might need or want is available at Government Costco – I picture this as the no-frills megastore on the UNAM campus in Mexico City – and delivered straight to your home by pneumatic tube.
Washing is done in public laundromats, but there isn’t much that needs washing: clothes are made from paper and discarded every night to be recycled. Public kitchens provide take-home meals and most people eat vegetarian food in government-run cafeterias.
Fossil fuels are gone, replaced with electrification (this is in 1888!), education and healthcare are free, and you’re even free to pick your doctor. What you aren’t free to do as an able-bodied citizen is not work – shirkers get solitary confinement and a diet of bread and water.
Basically, it’s the military – life aboard a battleship, except everyone is in the military, the country is the battleship, and there are no wars to fight.
Reading Looking Backward today is a strange experience, because a lot of what Bellamy described ended up actually happening. It just happened in a different country: Russia.
It’s difficult to overstate just how influential Looking Backward was, not only in the years following its publication but for decades afterwards. Roughly a hundred books were published after its appearance just in response to it. A similar number of “Bellamy Clubs” emerged across the country to discuss its ideas. Leo Tolstoy translated it into Russian. And it reignited a utopian impulse that had lain dormant since the Fourierism of the 1840s.
Incidentally, Bellamy hated the word socialism. He associated it with Europe, with revolution, with bloodshed. The problem was that he essentially came up with a version of communism from first principles, arriving there not via class struggle and the framework of historical materialism but through a detailed thought experiment working out solutions to the problems he saw in society. Unlike Marx’s vague sketches of what communism would actually look like, Bellamy’s vision was an elaborate blueprint. He defended his decision to avoid using the word socialism in a letter to his friend and mentor William Dean Howells, later editor of the Atlantic Monthly:
In the radicalness of the opinions I have expressed, I may seem to out-socialize the socialists, yet the word socialist is one I never could well stomach. In the first place it is a foreign word in itself, and equally foreign in all its suggestions. It smells to the average American of petroleum, suggests the red flag, and with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion, which in this country we at least treat with respect. Whatever German and French reformers may choose to call themselves, socialist is not a good name for a party to succeed with in America.
Demonstrating a level of strategic marketing savvy that the American left has been unable to match since, he called his socialist utopian doctrine Nationalism and in doing so made it palatable to patriotic, God-fearing Americans.
From here, standing at the top of Mt. Bellamy, we can finally start to glimpse the outlines of our destination: the doomed utopian outpost of Llano del Rio.
(By the way, if you had a book club and your month’s theme was the battle for the soul of America, it’s hard to imagine a better double feature than Looking Backward and Atlas Shrugged. It might be the end of your book club, though.)
California, here I come
Howells – the one Bellamy wrote to about socialism – was one of the people inspired by Looking Backward to write his own utopian book. He published A Traveler from Altruria in episodic form in The Cosmopolitan (yes, that Cosmopolitan) between 1892 and 1893. Less than a year after it appeared, a Unitarian minister named Edward B. Payne from San Francisco rounded up thirty people – mostly members of his congregation and their families – and they set out to Sonoma to establish the utopian settlement of Altruria. Utopian fever was back.
You’ll recall the Altrurians from Ambrose Bierce’s dismissive quote in the previous letter. Just as Bierce predicted, their community soon failed (by – it kills me to say this – fixating on building what amounted to a phalanstery). But at least they had fun while it lasted. A few months before the colony disbanded, a visitor remarked: “They are already a success – for they are happy.”
In San Francisco, a young socialist originally from Indiana named Job Harriman was paying close attention to the Altrurian experiment. Taking over management of the colony’s co-op store after the original manager moved to the (still functioning) settlement, he simultaneously became president of Altruria Sub-Council Number Five – many of the utopian colonies at the time received support from affiliated groups in cities, from people sympathetic to the projects but unable or unwilling to make the sacrifice themselves. Harriman often visited Altruria, witnessing for himself the day-to-day challenges of utopian community life.
He also joined a Nationalist Club (another name for the “Bellamy Clubs”) in San Francisco. When Altruria disbanded, he took it as a logistical and planning failure, not an indictment of the ideas behind it. For the next fifteen years, he nurtured a vision of a new colony, one that would draw on the lessons of Altruria and other settlements to finally succeed where they had failed.
After Altruria, Harriman became deeply involved in socialist politics. He was the Vice Presidential candidate on a Socialist Party of America ticket with Eugene Debs, the preeminent socialist politician of the time, in 1900. They got 0.6% of the national vote.
Harriman made a name for himself as a criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles before returning to politics, running for mayor in the 1911 election. He was a favorite to win in a city where a huge battle was playing out between labor and anti-union factions. In late 1910, a suitcase full of dynamite planted in an alley next to the headquarters of the Los Angeles Times exploded, killing 21 employees. Two brothers, members of an ironworkers’ union, were arrested for the bombing. The Times was notoriously anti-union at the time, and the labor movement became broadly convinced that it was a setup.
The case became a huge national spectacle, and Harriman championed the brothers’ innocence on the campaign trail.
The LA Times building after the bombing.
Just five days before the election, the brothers unexpectedly pleaded guilty and support for Harriman tanked. He lost badly, and gave up politics for good. But the vision of a successful utopian colony was still with him. And the end of his political career freed him to seriously pursue it.
Harriman was no wide-eyed dreamer. He knew his colony would live or die based on economic reality. It would need adequate starting capital, enough arable land to be self-sustaining, and access to markets where surplus produce could be sold. And it would decidedly not be constructing a phalanstery. From his decades-long involvement in utopian colonies and socialist politics, he knew the types of people the project would invariably attract, good and bad. If anyone could make this work, it was Harriman.
He found a tract of land for sale at bargain bin prices in the desert north of Los Angeles, just on the other side of the San Gabriel mountains, and he and a few supporters put down the initial payment. Unfortunately, the choice of location would prove to be the colony’s undoing. Because as anyone who’s seen Chinatown knows, the history of Southern California is a history of control over water.
After months of advertising and preparation, he was ready. In May of 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Harriman led a caravan of five families, five pigs, a team of horses, and a cow into the desert. This was the modest beginning of Llano del Rio.
The colony was organized from the start as a joint-stock company. Harriman issued two million shares and hired an agent to sell them on commission. Anyone who wanted to join had to buy exactly two thousand shares, structured as a minimum $500 down payment with an agreement that the rest would come out of the wages paid by the colony to every worker. That was a significant sum for the time – roughly $16,000 in today’s dollars. Not exactly within reach of the working poor, but an example of Harriman’s staunchly realist approach. In practice, because of constant financial struggles, the balances were never fully paid. The initial downpayment amounted to a one-time membership fee. If all this sounds familiar in the age of crypto, it’s because it is. ICOs funding DAOs buying land in the desert to build brave new worlds. At least the Llano colonists were mostly serious people.
Unlike the Fourierist settlements of 70 years earlier, Llano was the pragmatic and fully Americanized version of the idea, with its corporate structure and constant advertising in the era’s leftist magazines and newspapers. Harriman was selling a product, and the product was a lived experience of socialism. He anticipated Bucky Fuller’s famous idea: that if you want to enact change, you don’t struggle against the existing model (capitalism) but rather build a new one that makes the old one obsolete. And the only things lying around to build with were pieces of capitalism.
The first Christmas, with the lodge in the background.
Other than the economic organization, Llano was vanilla American: nuclear families occupying modest houses (or tents, as was the case early on), with no esoteric belief systems, funny ideas about communal living, or “sexual novelties” in sight. Less charitably, it was an amputated utopia. A classic Western town that traded the saloon for a library, with maypole celebrations and renditions of La Marseillaise standing in for gunfights at high noon. Men went to their assigned jobs in the morning while women mostly kept house – though to be fair, things became more egalitarian as time went on. Non-whites were excluded from joining. In many ways, it represented a huge step back from the communities that had preceded it. But unlike those, it kind of worked.
Combined with Harriman’s reputation, this helps explain why Llano del Rio grew so rapidly. The flyers dating from the founding of the colony stress its practical draws: solving the problem of unemployment and providing long-term stability for its residents. The US welfare state didn’t really exist until the New Deal, so this was a proposition with undeniable appeal.
The focused marketing attracted (mostly) serious and resourceful people willing to tolerate the hardships involved. But even Llano never quite solved the problem that plagued utopian colonies since Owen’s time: the shirkers, slackers, and revolutionary cosplayers drawn to them like mosquitoes to a barbecue. Robert V. Hine serves up one of these:
Slackers appeared occasionally… Comrade Gibbons providing a notorious example. A former member of the I.W.W. and a constant spouter of propaganda, Gibbons was afflicted with mysterious aches and pains, none of which ever showed external evidence, but all of which kept him from active work. His complaint came to be called “gibbonitis”, which for years designated a shirker in the colony’s vernacular.
One wonders if Bellamy’s solitary confinement with a diet of bread and water would’ve helped set Comrade Gibbons straight. But I think “gibbonitis” entering the lexicon is the harsher punishment. Iain Banks would’ve been proud.
Llano’s education system was revolutionary for its time and would be considered progressive even today. The colony established the first Montessori school in Southern California, enrolling over a hundred kids. Adults went to night school classes (or joined the gun club), while teens attended a hands-on Industrial School where they learned a trade while contributing to the colony’s production.
The whole place ran on a cocktail of grit and enthusiasm, sustained for years. But enthusiasm only gets you so far.
Democracy with the lid off
Since the colony was organized as a corporation, and each member held an equal stake in the enterprise, Llano was effectively a shareholder democracy. The company’s Articles of Incorporation served as its bare-bones constitution. A board of directors nominally ran the show, appointing a superintendent – the CEO, Job Harriman – to manage things. But the real power ultimately lay with the shareholders, and they wasted no time in testing the limits of the colony’s fledgling pocket democracy. Members called their gatherings in the dining hall the General Assembly. Hine writes:
The sessions often lasted from after supper to midnight or even till two o’clock in the morning. Pet projects, personal quarrels, and jealousies were all aired. Dozens of resolutions passed each session, many to be discarded two weeks later.
Even more memorably, one of its members described it as:
An inquisition, a mental pillory, a madhouse of meddlesomeness… a jumble of passions and idealism – and all in deadly earnest… It became a monster which threatened to destroy the colony… The General Assembly was democracy with the lid off.
In true socialist style, it took less than a year of the colony existing for a group of disgruntled members to try to overthrow Harriman. Calling themselves the Welfare League, they accused him of running a dictatorship and pushed to replace the existing system with pure direct democracy where every single decision would be put to a vote in the General Assembly. They plotted in the creosote bushes at the edge of the colony, which earned them – and future dissenters – the label “brushers”.
Their plan failed, and after an unsuccessful attempt to get Harriman removed by filing a complaint with the State of California, the brushers left the colony for good. They weren’t missed.
Despite holding together politically, as the colony grew from its modest five founding families to more than 900 inhabitants at its peak, other fractures appeared. Remember the truck system from Robert Owen’s New Lanark? Well it was back in Llano, with all the same problems. The credits members earned in lieu of wages slowly became worthless, earning the nickname “dobey money”, alluding to the colony’s early adobe dwellings with walls that melted away in the rain. Inhabitants complained of inflated prices in the co-op store, despite their leaders’ insistence that everything was sold at cost.
Ironically, these hardships had the effect of turning Llano’s original socialism with American characteristics into something more pure. Members attracted more by the prospect of steady wages than participation in a socialist experiment soon dropped out, while those who believed in the project stuck it out. Llano became, for all its faults, a community of hardworking idealists. Impressively for their size, they managed to actually achieve a measure of self-sufficiency, producing more than 90% of the food they consumed at their peak. But it was still a community of hardworking idealists supported by farming the desert. And no amount of idealism could overcome the water shortages they faced, or the destructive hypocrisy of the colony’s perfectly-named money man, Gentry Purviance McCorkle.
The dogs of Llano del Rio
I notice the incessant barking from the direction of the neighboring scrapyard when I arrive at the ruins. It soon fades into the background, a familiar bit of texture. The desert around Los Angeles has a pleasant edge to it: unpolished, subtly aggressive, though that edge seems to have gotten sharper over the past few years.
Not an album cover for The Dead Utopians.
What’s left of Llano’s lodge – a pair of chimneys, some columns, and a foundation – sits just off of Pearblossom Highway, California State Route 138. Your first challenge upon visiting is simply getting off the road without being killed. CA 138’s nickname, “Blood Alley”, is well-earned: aging pickups with tinted windows competing with semis for the fastest time from nowhere to nowhere, and the California Highway Patrol only stepping in occasionally to play referee.
Llano’s immediate neighbor today is a fenced-off junkyard. The contrast works: California’s physical and ideological discards baking side by side in the desert sun. By the time I come across the only remaining underground cistern, part of the colony’s irrigation project, the barking has stopped.
I try to reconcile these modest remains with the promise of a socialist alternative to Los Angeles.
The 1915 plan for the world to come.
The original city plan, drawn up by Leonard A. Cooke in 1915, was a grandiose radial layout for 30,000 inhabitants. Great promotional material, but utterly impractical given the actual capacity of the desert land.
The planned Socialist City attracted the attention of another architect and would-be city planner, Alice Constance Austin. The daughter of a railroad executive, she never became a member of the colony, but she saw its promise and set out to design its buildings and city layout.
I like her vision, even if it was pure science fiction. Drawing on Looking Backward’s underground pneumatic delivery systems, she placed the city’s entire logistics infrastructure in maintenance tunnels. Laundry, meals, and goods would be delivered directly to houses via these tunnels, freeing women from the shackle of housework. A ring road skirting the city doubled as a drag strip for weekend entertainment. Her designs for single-family patio houses featured sleeping porches and enclosed gardens – ideal for the Southern California desert climate. But by the time the plans were finalized, the colony was already in dire financial straits, and none of the houses were ever built.
Llano del Rio patio house drawings by Alice Constance Austin, from Dolores Hayden’s brilliant book Seven American Utopias.
Standing there in the middle of it all, surrounded by dry brush and dirt, I feel immense disappointment. The gap between then and now is too great. The gap between dream and reality is even greater.
Llano del Rio ended not with a bang, but a series of whimpers. Chief among these were disputes over water rights with neighboring ranchers. When the colonists lost their case – the opposing side’s lawyer called them “socialistic plunderers” – it became clear that the settlement was finished.
Circling like a vulture to pick apart its corpse was “socialist banker” and real estate mogul Gentry Purviance McCorkle, whose name I will never resist spelling out in full. McCorkle was an early admirer of Harriman and helped him finance the initial purchases of the colony’s land. Recalling their first meeting, he wrote:
Now I had often heard of Job Harriman. He was a leading lawyer in the state of California. He was the champion for the labor movement, defender of the poor, the dispossessed, the unfortunate and of the moneyless man. He was the chief defense of the working class in California. He was the best loved and most hated legal warrior in the city.
Gentry Purviance McCorkle was no idealist. Though he put up the initial capital despite misgivings about the colony’s economic feasibility, he leased back or held in trust the land and bonds in question, at a “generous” 10-12% annually. When the colony began to fail, he took action to make sure he came out whole. Harriman recalls:
He began to plot against the interests of the colony to gain possession of all the property for himself. He caused the Tilghman place – most valuable of our possessions there – to be lost and purchased it in the name of his wife, and entered into contracts with adverse interests by which he became beneficiary in many instances concerning both land and water. Under threats of foreclosure of mortgage, he forced the leasing of the entire place to outside parties, and, by cooperating with them, he stripped the ranch of the most valuable machinery and livestock. He then began foreclosure proceedings.
So there’s Chinatown again: the story of water and real estate. In fact, Mulholland’s Owens Valley aqueduct was being built at the same time, just 20 miles away.
That marked the end of Llano del Rio in California. But Harriman wasn’t ready to give up. Finding a small logging town with twenty thousand acres of land for sale in Louisiana, he rallied Llano’s most committed members and orchestrated a move across the country in the summer of 1917. There they found ample water, but a host of new problems, isolation being a big one.
Harriman slowly grew disillusioned with the project. After contracting tuberculosis – the damp Louisiana climate didn’t suit him – he returned to California and died shortly thereafter. New Llano, as the Louisiana colony was christened, carried on into the Great Depression years under different leadership. They even built a phalanstery. But the settlement never achieved the size or energy of its original California incarnation. Eventually it too dissolved in an ugly mess of bankruptcy proceedings and lawsuits that continued for decades afterwards.
I kick a rock unenthusiastically and start walking back to my car, ready to leave Llano del Rio behind. That’s when I clock the first black dog emerging from behind a creosote bush, heading straight for me.
And then I see the dog has friends.
Of course, nothing means anything else. A pack of junkyard dogs is just that. Wrong time, wrong place. Ludicrous to attach deeper significance, to seek a through line, a recurring motif in the long history of doomed utopias. Panicking, but not panicking, I smoothly throw myself into the back seat of the car (I was in the middle of grabbing my camera) and slam the door just as the first dog arrives and hops up against the window to get a better look. The others – I counted six – circle the car with a practiced casualness that only animals know. I’m trapped in the back seat, deprived of agency, grateful for my cage. They’ll get bored soon. They’ll leave. Eventually, they do. Somewhere overhead, unseen but giving itself away by the faint lawnmower buzzing of its engine, a Predator drone from a nearby General Atomics airfield circles. I don’t think it cares.
In 1940, Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, moved into a ranch house just down the road from the ruins of Llano del Rio. From his second floor window he could see the remnants of the colony a few hundred yards away. He also faced water difficulties, with his irrigation water controlled by a rancher higher up the mountain who released it only on certain days and at certain times. Years later, shortly before his death, Huxley followed in Bellamy’s footsteps and published his own utopian manifesto masquerading as a novel called Island. Unlike Bellamy’s sterile blueprint, Huxley’s utopia has a flair and weirdness that echoes Fourier.
Christopher Isherwood visited Huxley at the ranch, and later wrote about the local coyotes:
They would send their bitches to lure away the male ranch dogs and then set on them and kill them. A few ranch dogs were said to have been so big and strong that they killed their attackers and thereafter ran wild as leaders of the pack.
I’m just saying.
From Los Angeles,
S.
