Thy Neighbor's Wife (38 page)

After dinner, if there was not an outdoor concert or a children’s play or poetry recital in the auditorium, some members gathered in the parlor to talk or play chess, while others went into the library to read books, magazines, and such newspapers as the New York
Tribune
that regularly arrived by mail. While Oneidans were only peripherally connected to the outside world through their businesses, regarding themselves as “peaceful foreigners” in their native land, they were nevertheless interested in the headline events and polemics of their time, which rotated around the questions of slavery and suffragism, unionism and temperance.

Since Noyes neither drank nor smoked, both of these habits were considered vices at Oneida; and since the community’s religious beliefs taught that all humans were equal in the eyes of the Lord, there was unanimous support for women’s rights, the freedom of slaves, and the humane treatment of laborers. Although the community paid taxes, its men chose not to vote in elections; and for reasons never understood by Noyes, nor did he ever seek an explanation, no Oneida man was summoned by the Union Army during the draft act of 1863. It was possible that the military conscriptors felt that the presence of Oneida men might instill an immoral or quirky influence on other soldiers; or it was also possible that the location of the Oneida settlement, which straddled two congressional districts and two county draft boards, was considered by each to be in the domain of the other.

The Oneida businesses that had declined during the war were revived after the restoration of peace; and by 1866, as many army veterans returned to their civilian jobs as fur traders and trappers, the community’s factory was selling more than $1,000 worth of traps each week; and the bag factory, the flour mill, and the
other enterprises were busy enough to justify for the first time in community history the hiring of outside help to fulfill some of the less skilled labor requirements.

The community enlarged many of its older buildings and added new ones; it expanded its landholdings to 275 acres, and supported not only the two hundred members dwelling within its boundaries but also other converts at its branch commune in Wallingford, Connecticut. Some of the children of Oneida’s first settlers were now old enough to be attending college or to be assuming management responsibilities within the community. Noyes’s son, Theodore, was a medical student at Yale. George Cragin’s son, Charles, also an alumnus of Yale, was temporarily employed far from home studying the modern methods of silk thread production, which was to be one of Oneida’s future enterprises.

By 1869 Noyes believed that his community was sufficiently affluent and spiritually ready to venture beyond the realm of “perpetual courtship” and “male continence” and to attempt to create, through a committee-approved program of selective coupling, a special breed of Perfectionist children.

Prior to 1869, going back twenty years to Oneida’s founding in 1849, only thirty-five children had been born in a community that each year was inhabited by at least one hundred sexually active adults. While several of these births had been accidental—despite Noyes’s preaching, not all of his men proved to be flawless practitioners of continence—an equal number had been born with Noyes’s permission to women who feared that if they became much older they would be unable to conceive.

In addition to the thirty-five children, many other children had been brought to Oneida by their parents, who then surrendered their parental responsibility to the community and also sought to adjust to the community’s prevailing atmosphere of free love. In the free-love system at Oneida, any man wishing to go to bed with a certain woman had to first submit his request to a Noyes-
appointed intermediary, a senior woman who then relayed the “invitation” to the desired woman and ascertained whether or not the latter was willing. While any woman could refuse the propositions of any and all men, such rejections were generally not the rule in Oneida’s sex-affirmative society; and the sexual records kept by Oneida’s intermediaries indicated that most community women had an average of two to four lovers a week, and some of the younger women had as many as seven different lovers in a week. The purpose of the intermediary’s ledger was not to discourage the frequency of sex, for at Oneida a bountiful bed-life was considered healthy and proper, but instead it served as a check against those couples who might be overindulging in “special” affections for one another and not sharing their bodies with other Perfectionists. Any tendency toward “exclusive” attachments was discouraged by the intermediary, and Noyes had no intention of altering this policy even after he introduced his plan for selective breeding.

After informing the membership that Oneida now had enough money in its treasury to afford the addition of more children, and after asking for female volunteers who would lend their bodies to the procreative program, Noyes made it clear that he would influence the choice of each sire and that the women would have no exclusive maternal rights over the children they produced. Despite these restrictions, Noyes received more than fifty applications, all of which were affixed with the women’s signatures that affirmed the following resolution: “That we do not belong to ourselves in any respect, but that we belong first to God, and second to Mr. Noyes as God’s true representative…that we will put aside all envy, childishness, and self-seeking, and rejoice with those who are chosen candidates; that we will, if necessary, become martyrs to science, and cheerfully renounce all desire to become mothers, if for any reason Mr. Noyes deems us unfit material for propagation.”

After reviewing the submissions, Noyes rejected nine applications due to the person’s physical condition or to other unspecified reasons. The selected females, who were on the average
twelve years younger than the chosen sires, were in some cases virgins—and, not surprisingly, the man most favored by Noyes to impregnate these women was Noyes himself.

Of the fifty-eight live children born of this program, which continued through the 1870s, five boys and four girls were fathered by Noyes, and they carried his surname. The other fathers were senior Oneidans who, in Noyes’s view, were not only of superior mind and health but also adhered most faithfully to Noyes’s religious philosophy. One of Noyes’s appointed sires, however, was not a popular choice in the community, and this would eventually contribute to the schism that would shatter Oneida toward the end of the decade. The man in question was Noyes’s son, Theodore, a brooding and indecisive intellectual who had abandoned his career in medicine, remained skeptical of the Bible, and frequently exhibited signs of extreme selfishness and mental instability. And yet the elder Noyes clearly had a softness for this boy, the only one who had lived of the five children born to his wife in their early years of marriage; and Noyes’s continued permissiveness toward Theodore was the most flagrant mark of weakness and fallibility in this otherwise stern and righteous autocrat.

The complaints against Theodore included charges of orgasmic carelessness in his sexual relationships, a jealous attachment to a certain young woman, and a somewhat cavalier attitude toward the community’s business enterprises. After Theodore had gained access to a $3,500 trust fund that had been left to him by a Vermont relative, he vacated Oneida for New York City, leaving most members with the impression that he would never return. But once his resources had evaporated in ill-advised investments, and after his letters home indicated that his spirit had been chastened, Theodore was permitted to return to Oneida, where he was welcomed by his father like a prodigal son.

Forgiving as John Humphrey Noyes was of his son’s transgressions, he remained firm and inflexible toward anyone else who seemed to challenge his authority, and this was particularly true in the case of a convert named James W. Towner. Towner
was an articulate and impressive man who had practiced law in his native Ohio, had been prominent politically, but was suddenly the object of scandal when it was disclosed that he and his wife were members of the Berlin Heights free-love community. After the community’s love center had been set afire by a group of incensed townsmen, who also destroyed the printing press of the sect’s libertine newspaper, Towner hastily moved with his family and some friends into New York State, where he eventually met Noyes and was accepted into the Oneida community.

For a time at Oneida, James Towner was seen as a positive presence; he worked cheerfully and energetically at whatever task was assigned to him, and his intelligence and self-assurance soon commanded the admiration and respect of other members. Being that he was in complete accord with Noyes’s philosophy of selflessness and sharing, Towner did not anticipate that there would ever be a day when he would have ideological differences with Oneida’s revered mentor.

But in 1875 the sixty-three-year-old Noyes, feeling his age and sensing his mortality, astonished the community by announcing that the thirty-four-year-old Theodore would in the future become his successor; and while most Oneidans did not dare to question their founder’s judgment, a small faction did declare their doubts about Theodore’s worthiness, and perhaps the most loquacious of the dissident voices was that of James Towner.

Suspecting that this forthright and untimid convert from Ohio might himself be secretly aspiring to one day rule Oneida, Noyes was thereafter wary of Towner, and in the years ahead he made certain that neither Towner nor the other dissenting men would ever be chosen for the role of “first husband” to the new cluster of nubile virgins soon available for sexual congress. Unjust as this decision seemed to James Towner, it was even more outrageous to a few older men who, having been faithful for decades to male continence and Perfectionism, were now being denied the pleasures of propagation mainly because they had been unenthusiastic about the proposed elevation of a young scion whose
own
spiritual failings would in no way bar
him
from the bedrooms of
Oneida’s virgins. Indeed, Theodore would become a sire on three occasions—and, when added to the nine newborn children of his father, it would appear that Noyes
père
and perhaps even Noyes
fils
had instituted the program in the interest of everlastingly establishing their seed as the dominant root in the rich Oneida soil.

But if there was ever a time when the Bible communists could least afford internal squabbling, it was now, in the latter 1870s, for beyond the Oneida gates intensified displeasure was being expressed by clergymen and lawmen on learning that Oneida women were producing dozens of children out of wedlock, and Noyes was condemned on editorial pages as justifying in the name of eugenics the “ethics of the barnyard” and of creating a monstrous Darwin-inspired system whose ulterior motive at Oneida was “to kill off their sickly children.”

After a statewide gathering of Protestant clergymen had convened to organize a unified front against the Oneidans, the nation’s most powerful censor, Anthony Comstock, joined the campaign against Noyes, declaring that the community’s religious pamphlets and literature on free love—much of which had been sent through the mail—had violated the antiobscenity postal statute of the federal government, for which the punishment was imprisonment. Comstock himself had lobbied this act through Congress in 1873, and it had provided him, and his zealous minions within his Society for the Suppression of Vice, with a far-reaching whip with which to beat into line anyone who strayed from his straight and narrow view of morality.

In addition to incarcerating numerous vendors of French postcards, madams and prostitutes, and such irreverent freethinkers as the editor D. M. Bennett, Anthony Comstock had indicted—or would indict—museum dealers of nude art, pharmacists who sold condoms, publishers of marriage manuals and books on birth control by Margaret Sanger. Comstock railed against George Bernard Shaw’s play
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
, and he was instrumental in getting Walt Whitman fired from the Interior Depart
ment for writing
Leaves of Grass
. Comstock’s appeal to the United States District Attorney prompted the imprisonment of the radical feminist Victoria Woodhull, who as the presidential candidate of the Equal Rights party in 1872 had advocated free love, women’s voting rights, lenient divorce laws, and birth control; and who later, in her weekly newspaper, exposed the sexual hypocrisies of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, for which Comstock had her punished on charges of disseminating obscenity.

But as awesome and vindictive as Comstock was, the censorious crusader was not the worst of John Humphrey Noyes’s worries during the disruptive months of the late 1870s; Noyes had heard horrifying rumors that some Oneida defectors of the recent past were now being persuaded by government prosecutors to come forward and testify in court that Noyes had indulged in sexual intercourse with a number of young community women who were legally under age; and since this was true, Noyes knew that he could be charged with statutory rape.

With such pressure mounting against him, and with lawmen now arresting Mormon polygamists throughout the land, Noyes concluded that he had no alternative but to abandon his community. If he were to disappear, perhaps the enemies of Perfectionism would soon lose interest in retribution, as had been the case years ago in Putney.

And so on the night of June 23, 1879, without a word to most of his confidants, including Theodore, John Humphrey Noyes and an elderly colleague climbed aboard a horse-drawn carriage and passed through the Oneida gates, through which he would never return alive. Traveling westward through New York State, Noyes crossed over to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, where he eventually settled himself in a small home and would in time be joined by his wife and a few old-time loyalists. He was disheartened and enfeebled, but still hopeful that he would one day return to Oneida. In the meantime, he appointed a committee of caretakers—which included Theodore, but excluded Towner—to deal as best they could with the spiritual and busi
ness life of the three-hundred-member community; and his emissaries commuted regularly between Canada and Oneida carrying his spirited letters of instruction and advice to be read aloud in the mansion auditorium, where a majority of the residents still believed in his wisdom and supremacy.