John Humphrey Noyes

John Humphrey Noyes (born Sept. 3, 1811, Brattleboro, Vt., U.S.—died April 13, 1886, Niagara Falls, Ont., Can.) was the founder of the Oneida Community, the most successful of the utopian socialist communities in the United States.

The son of a well-to-do New England businessman, Noyes graduated from Dartmouth College (Hanover, N.H.) in 1830 and seemed bound for a legal career. But, after one year of studying law, he was swept up in the religious revival of the evangelist Charles Finney and decided to become a minister. He enrolled first at the Andover (Mass.) Theological Seminary but later transferred to Yale University.

It was there that Noyes first enunciated his belief in perfectionism, the idea that it is possible for an individual to become free of sin in this life through religious conversion and will power. Noyes declared himself free of sin and in a state of perfection. Because his views were in direct opposition to the prevailing Calvinist orthodoxy, he was refused a license to preach and forced to leave Yale. He then wandered around the Northeast, talking to other perfectionists and to social reformers.

In 1836 he organized a group of “Bible Communists” in Putney, Vt. The following year he wrote his “Battleaxe Letter,” in which he advocated free love, but it was not until 1846 that the Putney community abandoned “simple” (monogamous) marriages in favour of Noyes’s “complex” marriages.

In complex marriages, all the women of the community were wives of all the men and all men of the community were husbands of all the women. Sexual relations were permissible as long as there was mutual agreement and as long as men practiced continence so as to preclude pregnancy. Childbearing was a community decision and was based on selective breeding.

The Putney practices led to Noyes’s arrest for adultery. He jumped bail and in 1848 established a new community at Oneida, N.Y. The Oneida Community (q.v.) lasted more than thirty years, evolving from a faltering agriculturally based economy to a highly successful industrial organization. Until 1879, when Noyes succumbed to outside pressure and declining popularity, Oneida did not waver from his principles. That year the community abandoned complex marriages, and in 1880 it reorganized itself as a joint-stock company specializing in the manufacture of silver flatware. Noyes, meanwhile, was forced to flee to Canada to avoid legal action.

Eager to provide the outside world with candid and complete knowledge of his views, Noyes throughout his lifetime published several books of perfectionist doctrine: The Berean (1847), Bible Communism (1848), Male Continence (1848), Scientific Propagation (1873), and Home Talks (1875). He also wrote History of American Socialisms (1870), an investigation of utopian communities in the United States.