Perfectionists and the weather: The Oneida community's quest for meteorological utopia, 1848-1879, The

In time, the Oneidans began to enjoy an additional element of comfort. The medical authorities of the period strongly opposed the use of furnaces without open fires to create a draft and freshen the air, and they insisted on the absolute need for open windows at night. Early Community doctrine too called at first for shutting down the furnace at night, "opening the bedroom windows and filling the house with cold air."19) At an evening meeting in i86o, however, Noyes broke with the received wisdom. He declared that the furnace registers provided all the air circulation required and that a bitter chill was more dangerous than an occasionally stuffy atmosphere. The open window and the cold furnace at night were mere survivals, he suggested, from "the penurious habits of isolated life," and the community could well afford to discard them. Thereafter, though "crotchety folks-folks with peculiar ideas about ventilation" remained free to do as they wished in their own rooms, hot air from the furnace was provided at night as well as in the daytime, and those who used it suffered no apparent ill effects.20

The enclosure and covering of space for shelter was a goal that the Fourierites stressed but that the Oneidans more successfully put into practice. As a result, they faced less exposure to cold and other inclement conditions than their neighbors. In the mid-1860s, the Circular calculated the area of contiguous space within the Mansion House and its outworks "rescued from the wrath of old Boreas" as 444 square rods (about 11,000 square feet), not counting the cellars. It pointed proudly to "the amount of liberty in this respect that the Community enjoys during our stern winter weather," the freedom that members enjoyed to roam a wide expanse unhindered by the elements. "Those who talk of the curtailment of personal liberty as connected with association," the Circular admonished, "trust not neglect to put that item in their balance-sheet."21

Uniting many resources for work and entertainment in one place, the Communists were less exposed than most central New Yorkers to the difficulties of travel on muddy roads in spring and fall. They also suffered less from tedium when heavy snow or deep mud prohibited travel altogether. "Winter in Association," the Circular boasted, was a very different thing from winter as families living by themselves experienced it. The latter were all too often shut tip at home by the cold and the drifting of the roads in the very time of the year when the use of sleighs and the slackening of work would have made it possible for them to enjoy a steady round of visits and entertainments. The Oneidans experienced no such narrowing of their social circle. When a snowfall of several feet put central New York under a lengthy "snow blockade" early in 1865, Noyes and his people felt little deprivation. "A Community is like a garrison well-provisioned -we are a village under one roof," the Circular declared. "Drifts, or mud, or freshets do not suspend our social intercourse." A rainy midsummer in 1872 allowed them to make the point once more. Whatever might be said against communal life, "no one can deny that it possesses rare advantages for mitigating the horrors of a 'spell of weather' ... The social interchange of a Community is promoted rather than obstructed by a dispensation of clouds and vapor, for then we are thrown more closely together."22

When Community members had to fare forth into rain or snow, they could don protective outerwear from a common stock. In isolated individual life, everyone was obliged to buy such articles for the rare times when they were needed. A much smaller total met the Community's needs, for not all members ever required them at once. "Thus a dozen outside garments, as overcoats, cloaks &c., suitable for going abroad, are found sufficient to accommodate the whole Community." The supply of umbrellas from a similar stock represented another of the "economies of Communism" that the Oneidans were fond of enumerating.23 And not even for drying clothes were they dependent on the whims of the weather. The volume of their collective laundry made it feasible to install a heated clothes-drying room for use in wet or cold weather.24

In clothing design, the Perfectionists made one of their most notable and attention-catching contributions. They were among the American pioneers of the reformed style of women's dress, replacing the fashionable long skirt with pants and a short skirt, to which Mrs. Amelia Bloomer's name became popularly attached.?5 Throughout their existence as a community the Oneidans were among the most active and vocal crusaders for the reform costume. They braved much ridicule to exhibit its advantages to a world that never ceased to regard it as both improper and unattractive. In proselytizing for the reform dress, they pointed often to its suitability to all weather. The long skirt that it was designed to replace, "sweeping the muddy side walk on a wet day," was also unmanageable in high winds, and it endangered women's health by hindering them from exercising freely and easily outdoors in all weather. The reform dress helped make its wearers "independent of mud" and of much else besides. Group solidarity in turn helped the wearers support the burden of ridicule from the outside world-a burden so great that the Oneida women stopped wearing the reform dress, despite all of its advantages, once the Community dissolved.26

Livelihood-Industry and Agriculture

The Oneidans expected in several ways to be able to overcome the most important problems that the weather created in mid-nineteenth-century American economic life, those of the many short-term, weather-related peaks and troughs in activity, superimposed on the heavy seasonal unevenness of many occupations. They would escape the first by using "bees" to meet short-term demands for labor and the second by combining industry in winter with agriculture in summer.

The Perfectionists were as proud of their "bee" system of work as they were of pioneering the reform dress. "The practice of doing work 'by storm,' or in what is more commonly called a 'bee,'" they observed in their second annual report, "has been found very popular and effective." It allowed pressing agricultural tasks, such as picking, having, and harvesting, to be done "at a single stroke" and "with all the enthusiastic, sportive feeling of a game of ball." When "done in storm by a huge company," such tasks were, "as the phrase is, 'nothing but fun.'" The variety of tasks undertaken kept any of them from growing tedious. Entertainment, such as music by the Community band, was often provided to make the work pass still more enjoyably. The contrast was clear enough between the rapid and efficient results that the "combination of labor" made possible and the travails of the individual farmer trying to assemble an adequate workforce during the time when labor was everywhere in short supply.27

Like many rural Americans of the period, the Oneidans gradually reduced some of the sharpest annual peaks in labor demand by replacing human energy with machine power. They could again do so more efficiently than the family farmer because of the size of their operations. In the three decades of its existence, the Community mechanized such once laborious tasks as haying, harvesting, and ice cutting. Their new devices also helped lessen the impacts of unexpected weather interference; they sped the work when, for example, rain threatened to spoil haying.28

For all their eagerness to seek out only what was best in their weather, the Oneidans persisted for some time in one course of action that regularly brought out its worst side. Among the Community's auxiliary doctrines was an insistence on the moral and social superiority of horticulture, the intensive cultivation of fruits and vegetables, over the more extensive forms of agriculture based on grain and livestock raising. Another was a belief in the particular goodness of fruit as an article of diet.29 Once settled at Oneida, they began to plant large quantities of strawberries, grapes, pears, plums, peaches, and currants. It was not long before they began to suffer the consequences. Yet even after cold winters, spring frosts, and other staple features of the central New York climate had many times destroyed or damaged the more delicate fruits, peaches in particular, Oneidans renewed their efforts and saw the story repeated.30 They did what they could by siting beds and orchards in warn microclimates, protecting their trees with smoke and heat on frosty nights, and choosing the hardiest varieties available for planting. They eventually built an irrigation system to guarantee their strawberry crop, among the most successful of their plantings, against the chief threat to it, drought in early summer.31 But the climate in which they lived set limits to what they could achieve. Upstate New York had areas in which even peaches could be grown with profit, but they were places where the climate was moderated by proximity to water-to lakes Erie and Ontario and to the Finger Lakes in the central-western interior.32

In the end, the Oneidans met their practical needs by shifting from growing to purchasing much of the fruit that they could not reliably produce. They saved their doctrinal consistency by blaming human action, especially local and regional deforestation, for the severity of winter in a region that they supposed must once have been as they would have liked it to be. The weather of which they complained was not God's weather; it had been spoiled by mankind. The belief was incorrect, for earlier attempts to raise peaches and the like in the vicinity, when the forest cover was greater, also had failed. Yet their conclusion was, at the time, a scientifically respectable one. The Oneidans found backing for it in George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature and in the conservationist editorials of The New York Tribune and The Horticulturist. That the selfishness of isolated individuals had swept away the protecting forest and damaged the climate for all furnished them with a new argument for communism.33

Manufacturing, the planned mainstay of their winter months, had its own problems with the weather and the seasons. The issue of wage labor was especially troubling. The Oneidans had resolved originally to do without the help of hired outside labor. Though staunchly opposed to slavery, they acknowledged the justice of antebellum Southern criticisms of the North for its wage-labor system. They would not condone any institution that associated people in heartless relations of employer and employee rather than the bonds of community love.34

Such a system showed itself at its worst in the callous routine discharge of labor whenever it was not needed. Massive layoffs were a common phenomenon in nineteenth-century America, and much of the unemployment was seasonal in character. Many occupations, for reasons related to the weather, could not profitably be pursued at the same pace throughout the year. Some-notably farming-suffered directly from meteorological constraints that prevented them from being carried on at all seasons. Uneven demand during the course of the year for many other products, from coal to clothing, meant a corresponding unevenness in production, for efficiency demanded that supply not run too far ahead of sales. In different occupations, these factors produced different schedules of peak and slack times. But the overall pattern in the northern United States was one of high unemployment during the winter. The slower pace of agriculture, construction, transportation, and related industries in the cold months idled many workers and, by sharpening competition for work, forced wages down.35 The American Fourierites thought it conclusive proof of the irrationality of the prevailing social and economic system that "the "bitterest winter weather" coincided with "scant employment and increased expenses" that "double the burden of the laborer." "Why," they asked, with outdoor work more taxing and living costs greater, "should not the wages of this class of laborers be increased rather than diminished, during the winter?"36

One result of the seasonality of the economy was a phenomenon well known to reform communities and mentioned in the Circular. "Winter Shakers" were people who had no commitment to Association as a permanent way of life but who sought to exploit its practical benefits. They would try to join communities as the cold months approached, to enjoy shelter and security, then leave in the spring when their labor was again in demand in the outside world.37 There were few if any "Winter Perfectionists"; the Oneidans carefully screened applicants for admission to weed out the merely opportunistic. Instead of housing the jobless in winter, Noyes and his people proposed to show by example how the problem of seasonal poverty could be solved. The communal organization of society would provide all of the labor needed for a variety of occupations and harmonize its allocation across the year.

Foremost among Oneida's early manufactures were canned and bottled fruits and vegetables, traveling bags, processed silk, and traps for fur-bearing animals; the Community also ran a printing shop and grist and saw mills. The trap business soon emerged as its leading indoor industry. One member, an experienced trapper named Sewall Newhouse, had devised some lighter, sturdier, simpler, and cheaper models than the imported traps that dominated the American market. The Community began to turn them out in quantity in the mid-1850s with much success. Trap-- making was a business that suited it in many ways. Much of the work of making and assembling the parts could be done by machine, using the community's waterpower site on Oneida Creek and, later, steam power. The market for traps was not so large or so well served already that an enterprise as small as Oneida faced difficult barriers to entry. The high qualit, of their products soon won them a predominant share in the market.

As sales rose, it became clear that the Perfectionists had found a product that would support them in comfort. But it led them into a trap of sorts itself. The business was a highly seasonal one because of uneven demand. Fur-bearing animals either shed or thinned their coats during the warm months. As Newhouse explained, "All furs are best in winter, but trapping may be carried on to advantage for at least six months in the year, i.e., any time between the last of September and the first of April. There is a period in the warn season, say from the first of May to the first of August, when trapping is out of the question, as furs are worthless."38 As a result, demand for traps was highest from late summer through early winter and lowest in late winter and spring. Large wholesale orders by such retailers as the Hudson's Bay Company shifted the time of demand on producers even earlier, into late spring and summer. In short, trap making was far from the winter-peak industry that the Oneidans would have liked to pursue. It required a great deal of work in the periods-summer and fall-when outdoor work was heaviest, and it offered little to do in January, February, and March, when idle hands were most abundant. It amplified existing peaks in labor demand more than it offset them.

Success with this and several other products thus intensified the problem of seasonality in work. As early as 18 56, the Circular noted the tendency of trap-making to encroach on the outdoor tasks of summer and fall.39 Oneida's next most popular product, canned fruits and vegetables, fared quite well on the market, but like trap manufacturing furnished little to do in the winter. The work had to be done in the summer and fall, when produce was fresh, and sales, mostly to retailers, were heavily concentrated in the fall, peaking in October. The four months from September through December routinely accounted for more than three-quarters of the year's orders.40

In the early years at Oneida, frequent morning and evening bees at busy times allowed the Community manufacturing departments to meet their commitments. The increase in business, however, soon exceeded their capacity. As early as 1861, the Community began hiring some local hands in its outdoor activities. In 1863, the Oneidans surrendered their last scruples and began to engage domestic help and workers for the trap shop during the busy season. They rationalized the decision as something that had been forced upon them; "Our trap business has increased so much that we are overrun with orders, & are unable with our own folks to fill them, so that it was a matter of necessity to hire help."41 The bag-making and fruit and vegetable-preserving departments followed the example within a year or two.42 Though the Oneidans tried to hold on to their best workers by finding them work in the slack months, they routinely discharged many of the others when orders fell off and made it a rule "to keep the smallest number of hands that would do our work."43 They remained uneasy, and for a time they regarded the "hireling system" as "forced and temporary." They looked eagerly but unavailingly for "some business that we can carry on in connection with our trap-business, to which we can shift our help when our trap-trade slackens up." Their employees were "all anxious to work for us, and probably would work for less wages, if they could have work all winter."44 In 1868, they abandoned the fruit business as requiring more work in the already busy times of summer and fall than it was worth. Hiring had taken firm root, however, and in the early 1870s canning was resumed, mostly with outside workers. "We hire enormously in the fruit business," one member noted in 1877.(45)

Even those most hostile to the Perfectionists did not deny that they were model employers and were prized as such by their neighbors.46 It was chiefly in light of their own principles that they can be said to have failed. They did not, as they had hoped, meet all their labor demand with Community hands. To prosper as they did, they had to rely in their busy seasons on reserve labor from the outside, non-- Community world. Because they could do so, however, they succeeded, as they had hoped, in eradicating seasonal want from their own lives.

The Persistence of "Weather Grumbling"

Two decades into their life at Oneida, the Perfectionists had in many ways made the weather far less troublesome than it was for their neighbors. Steam heat, installed in the Community Mansion House in the fall of 1869, was not less sparing of fuel than the closed stove of the isolated individual family, still the norm across the northern United States at the time, or even the hot-air furnace.47 Moreover, it meant a level of uniform, cozy heat that only the richest private American householders of the day could enjoy. "Now the whole house is a model of comfort," wrote one Community member to another. "The moment you close the front door behind you, no matter how blustering the day outside, you are transported into an atmosphere of delightful warmth The Oneidans worried chiefly that they might find it too comfortable and be overly tempted to stay indoors in the winter.48

They had done much else in twenty years to reduce their troubles with the weather. In gradually substituting steam for stream power in their manufactures, they lessened the impact of drought or flood. Their own hours of work, courtesy of the hiring system, peaked in mid-September, but not dramatically, and then declined, with a corresponding rise in the time available for leisure, entertainment, and education, into the winter.49 Such innovations as a winter version of croquet and such improvements as a greenhouse added to their ability to enjoy all seasons equally.50 Many small incremental improvements during the 1870s made the weather still less of a hindrance or more of a help. Im874, for example, the Community voted to spend money on a door to shield the living quarters in summer from the heat and steam of the kitchen, blinds to protect an exposed tower room from the sun, double windows to insulate another room from the cold, an extension of the length of paved walks, and a new skating pond for the children.51

If the Perfectionists may be said ever to have freed themselves of most of the weather's burdens, it was during their last decade as a community. Thereafter, perhaps, they might have been expected to live up to their long-espoused doctrine of welcoming all weather and all seasons impartially. They indeed continued to preach "our philosophy that all weather is good to serve God in," that "those who have the weather in charge know what they are about," and that "the Lord manages the weather pretty well."52 But, in fact, the weather grumbling that they had set out to eradicate from the world did not even disappear from their own talk. It argues no great inconsistency on their part that they went on expressing pleasure or dissatisfaction with the weather as it assisted or hindered some particular activity. Thus rain was praised when it meant the end of a drought, an early snowfall praised for giving the children the treat of sledding, and a mild winter deplored when it threatened their ice supply. But when it came to judging the weather in its own right, as a matter of simple liking for some kinds over others, they failed the test that they had set themselves. They showed a persistent tendency to describe some kinds of weather as bad; they could not even manage the lip service to them that their doctrine required. Collected and tallied, their utterances during this final decade betray a heavy preference for sunshine over cloudiness and rain, moderate outdoor warmth over cold or heat, and spring, summer, and early fall over late fall and winter.

Occasionally they showed some self-consciousness in the matter: "I don't wish to be heard complaining of Providence but-this weather is very trying." Now and then they dutifully protested their equal liking for all conditions in a way that only reads as forced and mechanical -"We welcome the winter with joy unfeigned. ... Welcome winter!"53 Such formal words of welcome for winter were far outnumbered by such words as Oneidans exclaimed in these years: "Ugh! Ugh! The weather has changed from moderate to frigid since last night." They wrote in their weekly newspaper of the "melancholy impressions" and "the sadness" that the first snow always produced, of "a dreary day with some snow on the ground and more in the air," of the "cheerless scene" that the season presented, of a long winter as "dreary indeed," of their "illusions of hope" that it was finally ending, of their delight at seeing "welcome signs that winter is over and gone." Spring, by contrast, they condemned only for being too slow and irresolute in arriving. They had nothing but lavish praise for it when it fully appeared, as they had for summer, a time when "Nature is doing her best to be agreeable." Only about the occasional extreme heat of midsummer did they express some reservations. They praised fall only if it was summer-like, warm, and sunny;, otherwise they deplored its arrival. Sunshine they thought "unsurpassed in loveliness," while cloudiness and rain were "trying" and "frowning" conditions, "depressing, gloomy weather."54 Surviving correspondence written from Oneida in these years shows the same pattern of meteorological and seasonal likes and dislikes.55 So does the poetry, reprinted and original, that was a frequent feature of the Circular and its successor, The American Socialist. The more descriptive titles alone tell the story of what they celebrated in verse and, by omission, what they did not: "It Will be Summer Time, By and By," "In the Sun," "Spring" (no less than four of them), "May "Song of the Southern Breeze."56

The different values that the Oneidans placed on the different seasons and forms of weather closely matched those of the culture in which they had grown up. Noyes and his followers for many years defied every social convention that did not seem reasonable to them and sometimes risked the wrath of the law in doing so. Flouting the conventional ties of marriage and parenthood, the accepted standards of public dress, the institution of private property, and basic tenets of Protestant Christianity, they were fully capable of breaking with the weather preferences of their time if they had had a mind to. If they disparaged cloudiness and winter and exalted springtime and sunshine, it was not because nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture dictated such responses to them; it was because they meant it. Their failure to stop "grumbling" about some kinds of weather, on grounds other than their practical importance in life and livelihood, was their greatest failure in the task that they had taken on. It casts some doubt on the premise with which they began: All dissatisfaction could be corrected by a change in attitude or in ways of life. That so bright and independent a group did not discard the common meteorological likes and dislikes of their time, even after trying to, suggests that these preferences may go deeper than the Perfectionists believed and may indeed be felt all the more strongly when other causes of annoyance have been removed.