there; here is money, however, for your journey." And we give him
according to his character and worth in the society.
_Q_. Suppose a young man wanted to go to college?
_A_. If any one of our people wanted to train himself in some
practical knowledge or skill for the service of the community, and if he
were a proper person in stability of character and capacity, we would
send him, and support him while he was learning. This we have repeatedly
done. In such cases our experience is that when such young men return to
us they bring back, not only all the money we have advanced for their
support, but generally more besides. Suppose, for instance, one wanted to
learn how to dye woolens; we would give him sufficient means to learn his
calling thoroughly. But he would probably soon be receiving wages; and,
as our people are economical, he would lay aside from his wages most
likely more even than we had advanced him; and this he would be proud to
bring into the common treasury on his return. [Dr. Keil gave me several
instances of such conduct; and then proceeded, with a contemptuous air.]
But if a young man wants to study languages, he may do so here, as much
as he likes--no one will object; but if he wanted to go to college for
that--well, we don't labor here to support persons in such undertakings,
which have no bearing on the general welfare of the society.
In fact there is little room for poetry or for the imagination in the
life of Aurora. What is not directly useful is sternly left out. There
are no carpets, even in Dr. Keil's house; no sofas or easy chairs, but
hard wooden settles; an immense kitchen, in which women were laboring,
with short gowns tucked up; a big common room, where apparently the
Doctor lives with the dozen unmarried old men who form part of his
household; a wide hall full of provision safes, flour-bins, barrels,
etc.; but no books, except a Bible and hymn-book, and a few medical
works; no pictures--nothing to please the taste; no pretty outlook, for
the house lies somewhat low down. Such was the house of the founder and
president of the community; and the other houses were neither better nor
much worse. There is evidently plenty of scrubbing in-doors, plenty of
plain cooking, plenty of every thing that is absolutely necessary to
support life--and nothing superfluous.
When I remarked upon this to some of the men, and urged them to lay out
the village in a somewhat picturesque style, to which the ground would
readily lend itself, and explained that a cottage might be plain and yet
not ugly, the reply invariably came: "We have all that is necessary now;
by and by, if we are able and want them, we may have luxuries." "For the
present," said one, "we have duties to do: we must support our widows,
our orphans, our old people who can no longer produce. No man is allowed
to want here amongst us; we all work for the helpless." It was a droll
illustration of their devotion to the useful, to find in the borders of
the garden, where flowers had been planted, these flowers alternating
with lettuce, radishes, and other small vegetables.
Dr. Keil is a short, burly man, with blue eyes, whitish hair, and white
beard. I took him to be a Swiss from his appearance, but his
language--he spoke German with me--showed him to be a Prussian. He
seemed excitable and somewhat suspicious; gave no tokens whatever of
having studied any book but the Bible, and that only as it helped him to
enforce his own philosophy. He was very quick to turn every thought
toward the one subject of community life; took his illustrations mostly
from the New Testament; and evidently laid much stress on the parental
character of God. As he discussed, his eyes lighted up with a somewhat
fierce fire; and I thought I could perceive a fanatic, certainly a
person of a very determined, imperious will, united to a narrow creed.
As to that creed: He said it was desirable and needful so to arrange our
lives as to bring them into harmony with natural laws and with God's
laws; that we must all trust in Him for strength and wisdom; that we all
needed his protection--and as he thus spoke we turned suddenly into a
little enclosure where I saw an uncommon sight, five graves close
together, as sometimes children's are made; but these were evidently the
graves of grown persons. "Here," he said, "lie my children--all I had,
five; they all died after they were men and women, between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-one. One after the other I laid them here. It was
hard to bear; but now I can thank God for that too. He gave them, and I
thanked him; he took them, and now I can thank him too." Then, after a
minute's silence, he turned upon me with somber eyes and said: "To bear
all that comes upon us in silence, in quiet, without noise, or outcry,
or excitement, or useless repining--that is to be a man, and that we can
do only with God's help."
As we walked along through the vegetable garden and vineyard, I saw some
elderly women hoeing the vines and clearing the ground of weeds. I must
not forget to say that the culture of their orchards, vineyards, and
gardens is thorough and admirable. Dr. Keil said, nodding to the women,
"They like this work; it is their choice to spend the afternoon thus. If
I should tell them to go and put on fine clothes and lounge around, they
would be very much aggrieved."
The members are all Germans or Pennsylvanians. They are of several
Protestant sects; and there is even one Jew, but no Roman Catholics.
The band played on Sunday evening for an hour or more, but did not
attract many people. Boys were playing ball in the street at the same
time. Some _bought_ tobacco; which led me to ask again about the use
of
money. The question was not in any case satisfactorily answered; but I
have reason to believe that a little selfish earning of private spending
money is winked at. For instance, the man whose daughter's wedding I
attended kept a few hives of bees; and in answer to a question I was
told he did not turn their honey into the general treasury; what he did
not consume he was allowed to sell. "In such ways we get a little finery
for our daughters," said one. Again, when apples are very abundant, and
a sufficient supply has been dried for market, the remainder of the crop
is divided among the householders, with the understanding that they may
eat or sell them as they prefer.
There is an air of untidiness about the streets of the settlement which
is unpleasing. There is a piece of water, which might easily be made
very pretty, but it is allowed to turn into a quagmire. But few of the
door-yards are neatly kept. The village seems to have been laid out at
haphazard. Moreover, their stock is of poor breeds; the pigs especially
being wretched razor-backed creatures.
As to the people--there can be no doubt that they are happy and
contented. In a country where labor is scarce and highly paid, and where
the rewards of patient industry in any calling are sure and large, it is
not to be supposed that such a society as Aurora would have held
together nineteen years if its members were not in every way satisfied
with their plan of life, and with the results they have attained under
it.
What puzzled me was to find a considerable number of people in the
United States satisfied with so little. What they have secured is
neighbors, sufficient food probably of a better kind than is enjoyed by
the ordinary Oregon farmer, and a distinct and certain provision for
their old age, or for helplessness. The last seemed, in all their minds,
a source of great comfort. Pecuniarily their success has not been
brilliant, for if the property were sold out and the money divided, the
eighty or ninety families would not receive more than three thousand or
thirty-five hundred dollars each; and a farmer in Oregon must have been
a very unfortunate man, who, coming here nineteen years ago with
nothing, should not be worth more than this sum now, if he had labored
as steadily and industriously, and lived as economically as the Aurora
people have.
It is probable, however, that in the minds of most of them, the value of
united action, the value to each of the example of the others, and the
security against absolute poverty and helplessness in the first years of
hard struggle, as well as the comfort of social ties, has counted for a
great deal.
Nor ought I to forget the moral advantages, which appear to me immense
and not to be underrated. Since the foundation of the colony, it has not
had a criminal among its numbers; it has sent no man to jail; it has not
had a lawsuit, neither among the members nor with outside people; it has
not an insane person, nor one blind or deaf and dumb; nor has there been
any case of deformity. It has no poor; and the support of its own
helpless persons is a part of its plan.
This means that the Aurora community has not once in nineteen years of
its existence used the courts, the jails, or the asylums of the state;
that it has contributed nothing to the criminal or the pauper parts of
the population.
This result in a newly settled state, and among a rude society, will
appear not less remarkable when I add that the community has no library;
that its members, so far as I could see, lack even the most common and
moderate literary culture, aspiring to nothing further than the ability
to read, write, and cipher; that from the president down it is
absolutely without intellectual life. Moreover, it has very few
amusements. Dancing is very little practiced; there is so little social
life that there is not even a hall for public meetings in the village;
apple-parings and occasional picnics in the summer, the playing of a
band, a sermon twice a month, and visiting among the families, are the
chief, indeed the only excitements in their monotonous lives. With all
this there is singularly little merely animal enjoyment among them: they
do not drink liquor; the majority, I was told, do not even smoke
tobacco; there is no gayety among the people. Doubtless the winter,
which brings them all together in the village, leads to some amusements;
but I could hear of nothing set, or looked forward to, or elaborately
planned. "The women talk, more or less," said one man to me, when I
asked if there were never disagreements and family jars; "but we have
learned to bear that, and it makes no trouble."
It seemed to me that I saw in the faces and forms of the people the
results of this too monotonous existence. The young women are mostly
pale, flat-chested, and somewhat thin. The young men look good-natured,
but aimless. The older women and men are slow in their movements,
placid, very quiet, and apparently satisfied with their lives.
I suppose the lack of smart dress and finery among the young people on
Sunday, and at the wedding, gave a somewhat monotonous and dreary
impression of the assemblage. This was probably strengthened in my mind
by the fact that the somewhat shabby appearance of the people was only
of a piece with the shabby and neglected look of their village, so that
the whole conveyed an impression of carelessness and decay. Nineteen
years of steady labor ought to have brought them, I could not but think,
a little further: ought to have given them tastefully ornamented
grounds, pretty houses, a public bath, a library and assembly-room, and
neat Sunday clothing. It appeared to me that the stern repression of the
whole intellectual side of life by their leader had borne this evil
fruit. But it may be that the people themselves were to blame: they are
Germans of a low class, and "Pennsylvania Dutch"--people, too often, who
do not aim high. Then, too, it must be admitted that farm-life in Oregon
is not, in general, above the plane of Aurora. Dutchtown is an Oregonian
paradise; and the Aurora people are commonly said to "have every thing
very nice about them."
Moreover, I could see that such a community must, unless it has for its
head a person of strong intellectual life, advance more slowly and with
greater difficulty than its members might, if they were living in the
great world and thrown upon their individual resources.
Economically, I think there is no doubt that in the clearing up of their
land, and the establishment of orchards and other productive industries,
these Communists had a decided and important advantage over farmers
undertaking similar enterprises with the help of laborers to whom they
must have paid wages. For, though the wages of a day-laborer nowhere
yield much more than his support and that of his family, they yield this
in an uneconomical manner, a part of the sum earned being dropped on the
way to middlemen, and a part going for whisky, sprees, blue Mondays, and
illness arising out of bad situation, improper food, etc. The Aurora
colonists labored without money wages; they could economize to the last
possible degree in order to tide over a difficult place; they at all
times measured their outlay by their means on hand; and I do not doubt
that they made Aurora, with its orchards and other valuable
improvements, for half what it would have cost by individual effort.
Nor can it be safely asserted that there is no higher future for Aurora.
Dr. Keil cannot carry them further--but he is sixty-four years old; if,
when he dies, the presidency should fall into the hands of a person who,
with tact enough to keep the people together, should have also
intellectual culture enough to desire to lift them up to a higher plane
of living, I can see nothing to prevent his success. The difficulty is
that Dr. Keil's system produces no such man. Moses was brought up at
Pharaoh's court, and not among the Israelites whom he liberated, and who
made his whole life miserable for him.
II.--BETHEL.
Bethel is, of course, the older community; I describe it here after
Aurora, because my visit to it was made after I had seen the Oregon
community, and also because here is shown to what Aurora tends. The two
societies are still one, having their efforts in common; and I was told
that if the people at Bethel could sell their property, they would all
remove to Oregon.
The Bethel Community now owns about four thousand acres of good land,
exclusive of a tract of thirteen hundred acres at Nineveh, in the
neighboring county of Adair, where six families of the community live,
who are engaged chiefly in farming, having, however, also an old
saw-mill and a tannery, and a shoemaker's and a blacksmith's shop. These
families were removed thither twenty-five years ago, because it was
thought the land there had a valuable water-power.
Bethel has now above two hundred members, and about twenty-five
families. There are fifty children in the school, I was told.
They have a saw-mill and grist-mill, a tannery, a few looms, a general
store, and a drug-store, and shops for carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers,
tinners, tailors, shoemakers, and hatters, all on a small scale, but
sufficient to supply not only themselves but the neighboring farmers.
They had formerly a distillery, but that and a woolen factory were
burned down a few years ago. They mean to rebuild the last.
All the people are Germans, and I found here many relatives of persons I
had met at Aurora.
[Illustration: THE BETHEL COMMUNE, MISSOURI.]
The town has much the same characteristic features as Aurora, except
that it has not the exceptionally large and factory-like dwellings. It
has one main street, poorly kept, and in parts even without a sidewalk;
cattle and pigs were straying about it, too, and altogether it did not
look very prosperous. But the brick dwellings which lined the street
were substantially built, and the saw and grist mill which lies at the
lower end is a well-constructed building of brick. Half-way up the main
street was a drug-store, large enough I should have said to accommodate
with purges and cathartics a town of twenty-five hundred inhabitants;
and on a cross-street was another. Besides the chief store, I was
surprised to see two other smaller shops; and still more surprised to be
told that they belonged to and were kept by persons who had left the
community, but who remained here in its midst. Of these I shall have
something to say by and by.
At the head of the street stands the tavern or hotel, kept in the German
or Pennsylvania Dutch way--with a bed in the large common room, and
meals served in the kitchen. The German cooking was substantial and
good. To the right of the hotel, at some distance, stands the church,
placed in the middle of a young grove of trees planted much too thickly
ever to prosper. The church has a floor of large red tiles; a narrow
pulpit at one end; a place railed off at the other end, where the band
plays on high festivals, and two doors for the entrance of the sexes,
who sit on separate sides of the house. From the tower I had a view of
the greater part of the community's territory, which lies finely, and is
evidently a well-selected and valuable tract of land.
As in Aurora, they have preaching here every other Sunday, and no
week-day meetings or assemblages of any kind. They told me, however,
that they have a Sunday-school for the children, where they are
instructed in the Bible.
The preacher and head of this society is a Mr. Giese, appointed by Dr.
Keil; he keeps also the drug-store, where I was sorry to see liquor sold
to laboring men and others, but in a very quiet way.
The Bethel Society has six trustees, chosen by the members, but holding
office during good behavior. As in Aurora, no business report is made to
the society. Giese is cashier and book-keeper, and the trustees examine
his accounts once a year.
The real estate in Bethel is held upon a very extraordinary tenure. It
appears that--the settlement having begun in 1844--by 1847 there were
in the society some dissatisfied persons, who clamored for a partition
of the property. Dr. Keil thereupon determined to divide it, and to each
member or householder a certain part was made over as his own. Out of
the gains of the community in the three years was reserved sufficient to
support the aged and infirm, and I believe the mills were also kept as
part of the common stock. Thereupon some dissatisfied persons sold their
shares and went off. The remainder lived on in common, and without
changing their relations. To each person a deed was given of his share;
but those who remained in the society were told--so the matter was
explained to me by two of the trustees--not to put their deeds on
record; and later a deed of the whole property of the community,
including the individual holdings, was made out in the name of the
president, Mr. Giese. I did not see this document, but presume, of
course, that it gave him a title only in trust for all.
"Why did you partition the property?" I asked, curiously; and was
answered, "In order to let every one be absolutely free, and to see who
were inclined to a selfish life, and who for the community or unselfish
life." Moreover, I was assured that any one who wished might at any time
put his deed on record, and its validity would be acknowledged.
Now among the persons who left the society, six families were allowed to
retain their property, and of these several at this day live in the
midst of the village. One is a mechanic, who pursues his trade for
wages; and two others keep small shops. This appeared to me a really
extraordinary instance of liberality or carelessness; but no one of the
community seemed to think it strange. There are also one or two farmers,
not members; with one of these, a young man, I rode into Shelbina. He
told me that he had grown up in the society; that he had gone into the
army, where he served during the war; and when he returned he had got
tired of community life. He had also got some business notions into his
head, and thought the community affairs were too loosely managed. The
members, he thought, had not sufficient knowledge of business; in which
I agreed with him. But his house stood at the end of the village, and
the relations between him and his former associates were at least so far
amicable that one of the trustees took me to him to engage my passage to
the railroad station.
The society was strongest before Dr. Keil went to Oregon; he drew away,
between 1854 and 1863, about four hundred of the six hundred and fifty
persons who were gathered in Bethel in 1855; and among these were, it
seems, a large number of young men who did not want to serve in the war,
the society being non-resistants, and slipped off to Oregon to avoid the
draft. There are no accessions from outside, or at any rate so few as to
count for nothing. But, on the other hand, they assured me that they
keep most of their young people.
When one of the younger generation--for whom no property has been set
apart--wishes to leave, a sum of money is given. While I was there a
young girl was about to sever her connection with the society, and she
received, besides her clothing, twenty-five dollars in money. If she had
been older she would have received more, on the ground that she would
have earned more by her labor, beyond the cost to the society of her
care from childhood.
Some years ago they were subjected to a troublesome lawsuit, brought by
a seceding member to recover both wages and the property of his parents.
Thereupon, for the first time, they drew up a Constitution, which all
signed, and which binds them to claim no wages.
Clothing is served to all the members alike from a common store. As to
food: as at Aurora, each family receives pigs enough for meat, and cows
enough for milk and butter; and adjoining each house is a garden of from
a quarter to half an acre, in which the women work to raise vegetables
for the home supply--the men helping at odd hours. But it is plainly
understood that each may, and indeed is expected to raise a surplus of
chickens, eggs, vegetables, fruits, etc., which is sold at the store for
such luxuries as coffee, sugar, and articles of food brought from a
distance. The calves are raised for the community. I found that one
member was a silversmith and photographer; and all that he sold to his
fellow-members of course they paid for with the surplus products of
their small holdings. Flour and meal they take from the mill as they
please, and no account is kept of it.
The trustees are also foremen, and lay out the work. The people rise
with the sun, and have three meals a day. Before every house, neatly
piled up in the street, I noticed large supplies of fire-wood, sawed and
split. They hire a few laborers to cut wood for them; it is then drawn
into town and to each man's door by the community teams; and thereupon
each family is expected to saw and split its own supplies. In fact, they
make a general effort, and with singing and much merriment the
wood-piles are properly prepared. This certainly is a convenience which
the backwood farmer's wife is often without; but the untidy look of a
great wood-pile before each house vexed my eyes.
The older men complained to me that the emigration to Oregon of so many
of their young people had crippled them; and, indeed, I saw many signs
of neglect--buildings in want of repair, and a lack of tidiness. But
still they appear to be making money; for they have recently rebuilt
their grist-mill, and have also within a few years paid off a debt of
between three and four thousand dollars.
[Illustration: Church at Bethel, Missouri]
The religious belief of the Bethel Communists is, of course, the same
with their Aurora brethren. They venerate Dr. Keil as the wisest of
mankind, and abhor all ceremonies and sects. I was told that they
celebrate the Lord's Supper at irregular intervals, and then by a
regular supper, held either in the church or in a private house.
The people, like those of Aurora, are simple Germans of the lower class,
and they live comfortably after their fashion. They have no library, and
read few books except the Bible. They have never printed any thing. In
many of the houses I noticed two beds in one room, and that the
principal sitting-room of the family. Dr. Giese, the president, has
living with him most of the young men who are without family connections
in the society. There are usually no carpets in the houses. But every
thing is clean; the beds are neat; and it is only out of doors that
litter is to be found.