In Harmony with the Past
By Robert R. Archibald, President
Missouri History Museum
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| This community house (dormitory) was built in 1822 in New Harmony, Indiana, to house 40 to 60 single members of the Harmonist Society. Courtesy of LaVerne Jones/USI. | |
Eastern Montana slopes gently but inexorably upward for hundreds of miles from the North Dakota border to the Rocky Mountain foothills that rise in the western third of the state. In central Montana near Harlowton and Lewistown, small creeks flow down steep-sided limestone gulches north toward the Missouri River or south to the Yellowstone. Here low, meticulously maintained buildings huddle together just off the highway, surrounded by neatly planted fields that disappear at the horizon. It is late spring. Fields of wheat are that lush blue-green that can only be completely appreciated when contrasted with the dry windswept brown of late summer and the raw grayish white of a snow-splotched winter in these parts. The slate gray buildings belong to a colony of Hutterites whose ancestors came to the high plains of the United States and southern Canada more than a century ago. They are plainly dressed, German-speaking people who are extraordinarily successful farmers and ranchers. Their colonies are communes in which private property does not exist. They pursue holiness in their own way out here. Persecuted in Germany, the ancestors of these people came to the high plains seeking land, isolation, and freedom from persecution. Members work for the common good, and everyone is provided for.
The Hutterite expression of community is based on an old dream, which in both its religious and its secular forms is the dream upon which Harmony and then New Harmony were founded. This beautiful idea has always been a stark contrast with the individualistic and materialistic world beyond the confines of the commune. But the dream is not utopia.
My friend Robin is, like me, an only partially reconstructed refugee from the 1960s and early 1970s. While I buried myself in academia, she spent seven years on communal farms, first in Missouri and then later in Tennessee. Unlike the Hutterites who farmed their own land, selling surpluses for whatever cash was needed, at my friend’s commune farming alone could not sustain the group. Members also worked at jobs in nearby towns to earn the money necessary to purchase what could not be produced. The commune was on 300 acres of mediocre farmland. Buildings were ramshackle and devoid of most modern conveniences, including electricity and running water. Without defined and acknowledged hierarchy, rules were informal and essentially unenforceable. Behavior was difficult to control. Gradually the dreams faltered. Some members faced with the prospect of raising young children sought a better life and the comforts of modernity. Others were slackers and just did not do their share. My friend ran into too many obstacles in her efforts to create a decent and comfortable life for herself, her husband, and her children.
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In 1824, the Harmonists erected this fourth communal building, the last one before leaving for Pennsylvania. It was later converted into a Victorian theater. Courtesy of LaVerne Jones/USI. |
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The foundations of such experiments are based on assumptions of the fundamental goodness of humanity, a belief that, given the choice, people will sacrifice for the good of all. Whatever the outcome, these dreams of a better world reveal the better sides of our natures, and while often impractical, they do impart lessons in community building for all of us.
While communal living is not a universally applicable way for most of us to organize community life, it does provide an important counterpoint to societies that reward individualism and self-aggrandizement. Contemporary American life may represent the other extreme where the idea of civic life is impoverished, where the emphasis is not on the common good but rather on pursuit of individual fulfillment even when that fulfillment breeds savage inequities and profound isolation and environmental degradation. But here in New Harmony you live in the midst of reminders of the ideal, something that most of America lacks. If there are historical antidotes to the travails of 21st-century American communities, one beautiful example is here on the Wabash. Here there are marks on the landscape that are absolute proof that in this place people experimented with different patterns of living together in a community. The words “community” and “commune” come from the same Latin root, communis, meaning “common”; both ideas encompass common elements of shared lives and shared responsibilities.
Surroundings such as yours are not just nostalgic reminders of a bygone past but, instead, they make this place special, different from all other places, and existing on a continuum that encompasses within its boundaries time past, present, and future. Counterpoints like your town are very important. In the history of New Harmony is proof that we can imagine communities differently, that modern, isolated, and unconnected places are not the only option. And it is not that we seek to replicate the Harmonist experiment or the experiment of Robert Owen. We just need evidence that it is possible to do it differently if we want to.
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| The Harmonists planted labyrinths to symbolize the difficult path of life to reach true harmony and perfection. Courtesy of LaVerne Jones/USI. | |
Good communities are historically connected. No real community consists of just the living; rather, it is understood by every generation that a community is a work in progress and that each generation builds upon the past while simultaneously preparing its own legacies to be left to those who follow. Without past and future consciousness, generations build poorly because they are marooned in time present, incapable of building anything of lasting value, living for the moment, and leaving the future to its own devices. Good communities encompass knowledge of the past and obligations to the future. Reminders of the past surround them, reminders that are also harbingers of the future. The past is proof that time passes, that there is generational replacement, and that we are destined to become the past for a future we will not inhabit.
These are obscure ideas for Americans because we are a new nation in a new world that, until recently, seemed to have a limitless supply of both land and resources that encouraged us to be profligate. We abandon communities and build new ones because we can afford to. The west is dotted with ghost towns left behind when the mines played out or when railroads and highways bypassed them. Other ghost towns in our cities happened when people headed to the suburbs or moved to the Sunbelt. Abandonment is a characteristic of the American landscape. It may stimulate my imagination to pass by forlorn, crumbling buildings on disintegrating streets, but this deliberate loss also represents an obliteration of the past, a loss of memory, and the waste of precious resources expended in the past and lost to the future that may desperately need them.
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Top: St. Louis City Hall. Photograph, ca. 1900. Missouri History Museum. Bottom:
Interior of the Board of Aldermen's Chambers in St. Louis City Hall. Photograph by Emil Boehl, ca. 1900. Missouri History Museum.
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The evidences of the past persist in my river city of St. Louis and in your beautiful river town. A few days ago I was one of hundreds who participated in a trivia contest in the rotunda of St. Louis’s City Hall. This grand building was constructed more than a century ago of stone, brick, and marble. Both the interior and exterior are magnificent, making bold statements about the importance of civic life and the idea that the public’s business deserved an important space as its home. The building is about us past and present collectively, not individually. There are paintings and plaques on the walls, in the second floor corridors a portrait of every mayor of the city since the first one in 1823. There is an enormous plaque in the rotunda with the names of every St. Louisan who died in the Great War. Other statuary and memorial markers commemorate civic tragedy and achievement and citizens who sacrificed for the common good. This imposing civic space reminds all those who enter that St. Louis is an intergenerational work in progress and that the laborers on this project include the dead, the living, and the unborn. Spaces such as these, houses for the public, are grander than the homes of individuals, symbolizing the great power that we wield together although we are individually weak. The building itself was meant to encapsulate in its grandeur the civic enterprise and to express the collective confidence that together we can aspire to achievements that are otherwise unattainable. The building is a sublime message to us and those who will follow about enduring values implicit in community.
Washington Avenue in St. Louis was once the heart of the American shoe industry and of women’s ready-to-wear clothing business. The huge buildings that still line Washington Avenue were built by merchant princes, each attempting to outdo the other in fine materials and magnificent architecture. The buildings that remain are festooned with stone veneers and ornate cornices on imposing framework. No business in its right mind builds such edifices today. Such buildings would be extravagances that subtract from the bottom line and detract from shareholder value. Besides, who needs buildings designed to last for centuries? I ponder the thoughts of the men who were the builders of Washington Avenue (and of course then they were mostly men). I suspect competition with peers was a motivation for many of them. These buildings are big, huge boasts, exhibitions of shimmering peacock feathers. They were tangible expressions of success. These men also built well in order to achieve an immortality embedded in architecture. They wanted us, the generations of the future, to know of their wealth, their achievements, and what they assumed was their own good taste. So for their own reasons they built for themselves and their own time, but they also built for us.
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| Main lobby of The Lofts at 2020 Washington, which were completed in 2005 by the Pyramid Companies. The building used to house an Emerson Electric factory. Courtesy of the Pyramid Companies. | |
Now people flock to live in the lofts into which these gigantic old factories have been converted. All the loft dwellers I talk to know something of the history of the building in which they live. That history is one reason they live there. A friend has a loft in an eight-story factory building that was originally the home of Emerson Electric. Emerson got its start by making the first electric fans, a godsend in those years before refrigerated air conditioning. Pictures of people at work in the fan factory now hang on the lobby wall near the elevators, reminding residents and visitors that this building has deep roots and important historical connections. Unlike pop-up box buildings on the urban periphery, these buildings exude permanence and reflect bygones. Residents seek and find connections to generations past, and they appreciate how those generations built with fine attention to aesthetics. They also know that few new residences can match the quality of materials and solid construction of the old structures. But I think they also are looking for an alternative to the suburban model of community. In these old buildings people live close together. Each building has a homeowners’ association that meets regularly to address residents’ common issues and to plan social events for the building. There are bulletin boards near the elevators and lots of casual association in the hallways. Neighbors have keys to each others’ condominiums and regularly raid each others’ pantries and refrigerators. Some people do not even lock their doors when they are at home. Hallways, lobbies, elevators, garages, trash compactors, mechanical systems, and the building envelope are owned in common. Signs urge residents to keep common areas clean and to prevent jamming the trash compactor. Buildings are close together, and residents of different buildings mingle in restaurants and nearby shops, and if they are not friends at least they become familiar faces and nodding acquaintances. It is not a commune, since individual condominiums are privately owned, but it is a reinvigoration and dramatic expansion of ways of living more closely together than we can in suburban single-family homes. In this popular new pattern of living in historic old buildings I find cause for hope. I know cities, suburbs, and villages and towns of all shapes and sizes, and I conclude that population density is related to the possibilities of community building. There are suburban gated communities where covenants and zoning specify minimum lot sizes of one to three acres. Community building based on familiarity and trust is difficult in these places. Ironically, while such places are among the safest places to live, many of them have security guards posted at their entrances. Isolation breeds fear and mistrust of what is not known.
The past cannot be ethereal. The past of history books, too often disconnected from real reminders on the landscape, may be a good story, but its credibility is suspect because tangible verification is not possible. The history books are disembodied from place and without physical referents. The past only becomes palpable when it is reinforced by the solid, the visible, the touchable. We must not be too quick to obliterate what is old in favor of what is new, or we will become marooned in a present with no mnemonic markers that the past happened exactly where we stand. As more of the past is obliterated, we become spiritually destitute because we lose all sense of connection to our places and to each other and to ourselves. Our decisions are made entirely of the moment without regard for what came before or what is to follow. Consequently, we are tempted to treat each other and our places as consumables with no acknowledgement of our profound obligation to respect the past and consider the future in all we do. A future without a past is not conducive to those connections upon which both our personal well-being and healthy community depend. History makes places significant. Obliteration of the history of places destroys their value.
In 1993 the Mississippi River indulged in one of its periodic rampages in the St. Louis region. Whole communities were flooded out, and we watched in horror as whole houses swirled in the dirty brown currents and gradually disappeared. Faces contorted by confrontation with fear and loss stared from front pages of the daily paper, while others sobbed as they described their plight for leering cameras on the television news. When the bereft in the grips of emotions described their losses, it was the loss of those things that reinforced memory that were most tragic. Few mourned the loss of a car or other replaceable things that were worth lots of money. Their deepest sorrows were reserved for irreplaceable photographs of childhood events or family reunions, grandmother’s handmade crazy quilt, father’s purple heart from service in WWII, great-grandfather’s mother of pearl cuff links, and mother’s favorite candlestick. Memory is, of course, our most intimate possession, and those keepsakes that reinforce it are the biggest losses of all.
We cannot live without the past, the story of ourselves that is always a work in progress. This story is reshaped by new experience and rethinking but nevertheless always requires some confirmation in the physical world. We all build museums of ourselves. I am the youngest child of four. As grandparents and parents died, my older siblings had first claim on most of their personal possessions. They took only a few token reminders of special importance to them and sent the rest to me. They could not bear the thought of calling Goodwill or the Salvation Army. So I am the default repository for my family’s museum, and I cannot bear to rid myself of the leavings. As I sit in my living room writing this, I see my great-grandmother glancing sideways at me from her portrait above the mantle. The ornately hand-carved chest is against the opposite wall. I do not know where it came from, but my family has had it for at least four generations. I inherited the wonderful mantel clock from my Jewish stepfather, who was a dear friend in my late adolescence and early adulthood. His ancestors came from Germany and brought the clock with them. It is my only reminder of him. My museum may be more extensive than some, but we all have them. It is how we know who we are.
But good communities are museums, too, if we want them to be. I have lived in places with no past, and they stultify me. Places without a past tend to blandness and sameness all over our nation. They are interchangeable. Wal-Mart, Target, McDonald’s, and Home Depot are the same wherever we find them. They all rely on cheap architecture of impoverished design and comfortable predictability. Homogeneity also characterizes residential suburban architecture. While we loudly proclaim how much we value difference, we really are more alike than ever before. We watch the same television shows, buy most everything in the same places, get our news from the same sources, and while we like to believe that we have more choices, we really have fewer than we imagine. Our choices are controlled by fewer large corporations than ever, and we are profoundly affected by fads in everything from cars and houses, to clothing, food, and pets. I have no idea why, but certain breeds of dogs fall in and out of fashion; the Furby talking dolls of a few years ago are now forgotten and people wait overnight outdoors in frigid weather to buy the latest Playstation.
Really good places for people are museums. St. Louis is a museum. The architecture includes 19th-century row houses, rooming houses, and the four-family flats that were homes to waves of immigrants from everywhere. Church steeples are ubiquitous, marking neighborhoods, ethnicity, and the outlines of a walking city. The shuttered public bathhouses are proof of 19th-century efforts to figure out how to define the role of government, enhance quality of life, and prevent the spread of deadly contagious diseases. In some places streetcar tracks heave through the pavement and suggest a time when the automobile did not dominate. There are large parks all over the city, most of them at least 100 years old. The multiple generations of people who planned the city wanted to give those confined to a cramped, unsanitary, and dreary life in working-class tenements opportunities for outdoor recreation, which, those planners concluded, would nurture healthier bodies and uplift spirits. There are still shackles bolted into the walls of the old city insane asylum where the sick were just controlled, not cured, cautioning us to remember what happened before we were here.
New Harmony, too, is a museum. I have visited your town before, wandered the streets, and read the text on historical markers and in the guidebooks. I have imagined the dreams of George Rapp and of Robert Owen and those who transposed those dreams onto this landscape. This landscape urges us to remember.
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| In 1825, Welsh utopian Robert Owen purchased the community of New Harmony from the Harmonists (a German communal society that relocated to Philadelphia) in order to create a model community of education and social equality.Courtesy of the Warren J. Samuels Portrait Collection at Duke University. |
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New Towns are sprouting all over the United States; there is a New Town on the western edge of the St. Louis metropolitan area. These places are arranged according the tenets of the “new urbanism.” This strategy takes urban ingredients like a mixture of single and multi-family housing, front porches, sidewalks, garages that don’t face the street, corner stores, and picturesque public buildings and applies them to a suburban setting. The result is like one of those Norman Rockwell paintings of an idealized and sanitized America. Appropriately enough, the Walt Disney people built the first New Town and called it “Celebration.” The New Town people forgot about the history part. Real cities do not pop up but instead grow through multi-generational accretions. Celebration, St. Louis’s New Town, and the others are towns without a past. Places without a past are devoid of deep human attachment. People may enjoy the lifestyle in a somewhat eccentric suburb, but suburb it is, with no more attachment for residents than the standard cul-de-sac town. The past must be associated with real things. Anything else is a movie set, people acting as if the past is present in such places.
When New Towns have no past, and every place is just like every other place, it no longer matters where we live. When places don’t matter, who will take care of them?
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| Residents of Eastern Village Cohousing in Silver Spring, Maryland, live in separate condominiums but share common rooms such as this kitchen in a building that also contains a community living room and playrooms. Courtesy of Eastern Village Cohousing. | |
Just a few generations ago people got their food, clothing, and building materials from local producers. Now I don’t know where anything I consume is produced. Not that many years ago our grandparents did most of their business with friends and neighbors. More than money exchanged hands. Shopping was a social experience in which gossip was exchanged, opinions were expressed, and behavior was discussed. These processes build communities because they bring people together in informal situations, create opportunities for mutual exchange, and engender familiarity and trust. Now commerce is detached from place. Even at the local shop or hardware store we are not doing business with friends and neighbors; although some neighbors may work there, the owners are generally far removed from the town. We are doing business with a corporation that likely has little at stake in the welfare of the community. Some say that the Internet is the new source of diversity and individuality. I say that the Internet, the websites, the blogs, the chat rooms are all detached from place. I say that while information technology is the handmaiden of globalization, it reinforces a growing sense among many that particular places don’t matter. When I attempted to straighten out my phone bill, I was talking to a call center in India, I think. Did where the call originate matter at all to the worldwide company? Did it have a stake in any place on the planet—or only in its phone lines and its shareholders’ bottom line?
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Cohousing units share outdoor space. Courtesy of Eastern Village Cohousing. |
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It is easy to view the past through the rosy glasses of nostalgia and romance. The past, I must caution, was not a better place. Yet in that past we may find useful messages about how best to live together, not by re-enacting the past but by living with it and borrowing from those attributes that fit our times. The crisis of this new century is twofold; how do we retain the importance of place and community in an increasingly homogenous global world and how do we live on the earth in such a manner that guarantees the unborn decent life chances? The good news is that the two questions may have similar answers. Good places for people that nurture relationships and engender both a sense of community and a responsibility for the common good can also be less consumptive of this earth’s finite resources. By considering how we might best live together with the greatest felicity, we can simultaneously pursue sustainability of those places to which we are most intimately connected. We will thus become conservatives in the real meaning of the word, understanding that the creation of sustainable communities and good places for people are the best guarantees of opportunities for good lives for our children. To do these things we must care about our places. We will care most if we stay put, conjoin our own memories to our places, attach ourselves to those who preceded us, and allow our places to become the crucibles for our lives. But we must acknowledge that history really matters and that surrounding ourselves with reminders of the past enhances our own sense of well-being, connects us to the past and to the future, and makes our places worth caring about.
Let us not be afraid to live more closely together. Let us remember solemn obligations to generations past and future that we will never know. Let us arrange places to encourage relationships, mutual responsibility, and trust, for in doing this we can provide sustainability for our communities and for those places that enfold our lives. You do not need to become Harmonists or follow the tenets of Robert Owen to strengthen and enrich your community. You are surrounded by what they left you, to remind you every day to take what you need from the past for the present and also for the future. We need not choose to live in communes but we must choose to live in communities.