The Noyes Plays

The True History of John Humphrey Noyes and the Oneida Community - Parts 1 & 2

John Humphrey Noyes founded the most revolutionary of all communal experiments in the nineteenth century and in American history the Oneida Community. As the selfordained Father of his utopian followers for thirty years, Noyes collectivized labor in the Communitys industries and abolished private property on the grounds of its Mansion House at Oneida, New York. But the defrocked preacher of Christian Perfectionism went still further: not only property, but spouses, were to be held in common in the Noyesian vision of heaven on earth.
In the Communitys newspapers, including THE AMERICAN SOCIALIST and THE CIRCULAR, Noyes proclaimed that the Oneida system of Complex Marriage had eradicated the subjugation of women, the tyranny of monogamous marriage, and the burden of unwanted children. Finally, Noyes came to believe that his system made possible the betterment of human stock through a program of selective mating. Race Culture or, as Noyes eventually termed it, Stirpiculture, would become the utopian Communitys ultimate experiment: the application of scientific breeding to human beings.