City Dreams, Country Schemes: Community and Identity in the American West

Index

PREFACE

This collection of thirteen chapters by noted historians explores how new approaches to urban and rural development influenced the creation of community and identity in the twentieth-century American West. Each chapter considers how a specific western locale drew upon earlier utopian traditions to fashion new communities that purposely blurred the boundaries between urban and rural spaces. In so doing, the people of these locales sought the best of both worlds—the best landscapes, the best amenities, and the best people. Unlike earlier utopian projects, however, these westerners no longer believed that perfection was attainable, nor did they seek isolation from modern consumer culture. Instead, they shaped their metropolitan landscapes into spatial and cultural middle grounds that encompassed the cultural enrichment of cities, the security and social status of suburbia, and a natural aesthetic. In these communities, people forged new identities through restricted social space, common obligations, and shared experiences and interests, defining themselves by who was excluded as much as who was included.

The editors are grateful for the support they received in completing this project. This collection began as a conference called Paradise Paved: Utopian Imaginations and the Southwestern City at the University of New Mexico in April 2002. We are very grateful to Virginia Scharff, director of the Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico, who funded the Paved Paradise conference, and continued to provide ideas and encouragement as we moved forward with this collection. Judy Mattivi Morley did much of the organizing work for Paved Paradise, contributed to the original proposal for this collection, and offered editorial comments on several of the chapters in this volume. John Findlay, Sylvia Rodriguez, Jeff Sanders, Amy Scott, Judy Mattivi Morley, Chris Wilson, Myla Vicente Carpio, and Pablo Mitchell presented conference papers. The University of New Mexico's Center for Regional Studies, directed by Tobias Duran, and the History Department also provided financial support for the conference. Evelyn Schlatter and Clark Whitehorn offered helpful editorial comments on the first draft of the manuscript.

The insights of Eugene Moehring, David Wrobel, and the anonymous readers elevated the central arguments of this volume. Matt Becker, Sara Vélez Mallea, and the staff at the University of Nevada Press brought this project into its final fruition.

Ultimately, we thank our families, friends, and colleagues at Bradley University and the University of Houston for their support and enthusiasm.

Introduction

AMY L. SCOTT AND KATHLEEN A. BROSNAN

In Looking Backward (1888), Edward Bellamy tells the story of a man who falls asleep in 1887, awakens in 2000, and discovers a United States where goods are equitably distributed and capital is commonly owned. Steeped in socialist theory, his utopian vision critiqued industrial capitalism and argued that better alternatives existed.¹ Looking Backward was part of a larger literary tradition in which authors offered idealized visions of future communities as a means of satirizing religious, political, or economic conditions in their contemporary worlds.² Translated from the Greek, the term utopia means either no place or good place. For Sir Thomas More, in 1516, it was the former; he believed perfection was unattainable.³ In The New Atlantis (1626), Francis Bacon provided a counterpoint, the city of Bensalem, a fictional place where residents relied on scientific empiricism to build a peaceful and more prosperous society.⁴ And throughout history people sought utopias where rational systems might overcome societal ills, communities where they might avoid religious persecution, or spaces where alternative ideologies might be tested and new identities formed.

Like Bellamy's protagonist, the contributors to this volume look backward from the twenty-first century, albeit from the perspective of history, to discover that idealized community visions, no matter how imperfectly implemented, shaped the landscapes of the American West and relations among its inhabitants. Bacon had located Bensalem on an island off North America's West Coast, and Americans frequently looked to the West and its mythic frontier for the fulfillment of their quixotic dreams. The region's presumed emptiness, its newness, and the opportunities it afforded led visionaries to believe they could forge stronger communities in the West.⁵ The social discourse of Bellamy and others inspired late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century planners to conceptualize urban environments that fostered social order, cultural cohesion, and a better quality of life through improved design, ordered development, and attention to the links between society and nature. They created an intellectual context in which western communities were planned and sometimes experienced.⁶

As John Findlay explains in our opening chapter, western cities became the focus of utopian community building in the nineteenth century, both in reality and on paper. Many migrants saw the region as a place where they might stand apart from the sweeping transformations of modernity. Other settlers and speculators laid out ambitious plats, envisioning prosperous cities that might dominate the region's resources and markets.⁷ In reality, contentious social relations forged in conquest, environmental limitations, and economic dependency thwarted the realization of the West as an ideal place for constructing independent communities from tabula rasa. Nonetheless, twentieth-century westerners continued to plan prototypical communities in the West. Perhaps they doubted that perfection could be realized, but ambitious planners still believed that societal improvements and stronger communities could be achieved, in part, by shading the lines between city and country.

This blurring of physical space became a central tenet of community building in the metropolitan West of the twentieth century, although it has earlier origins. Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted began experimenting with the integration of urban and ecological systems in his design of urban pleasure grounds in the 1860s. By the turn of the twentieth century, the influence of Olmsted and other landscape architects reached across the United States and across the oceans.⁸ Inspired by Olmsted, Bellamy, and others, Ebenezer Howard, a prominent British urban planner, published To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898 (reprinted three years later as Garden Cities of To-Morrow).⁹ Howard's influence crossed the Atlantic, and his ideas on community design and social improvement influenced the city builders of the American West, including Frederick Law Olmsted II. Like Bellamy, Howard accepted the notion that contemporary society was transitory and that hierarchical planning by experts would enable people to avoid the worst aspects of industrialization in the future. However, Howard rejected the centralization of authority inherent in Bellamy's socialist critique and instead devised a model community that balanced private initiative and collective enterprise.¹⁰

As Thomas Bender observes, "In both popular and academic discourse, the word community has quite positive connotations that are associated with visions of the good life. Yet there is, and always has been, an undercurrent of fear associated with the idea of community." Some Americans worried that urban industrialization had undermined the small-town values that once shaped their lives.¹¹ Howard proffered an alternative vision of a modern society free of slums and poverty where planned communities were surrounded by agriculture and successfully integrated town and country. Howard's garden cities sought the best that each offered (the city's culture and economic drive and the country's connection to nature's restorative powers), while avoiding their worst (urban industrial blight and rural isolation and stagnation). Howard's attempts to realize his vision in the multicentered British towns of Welwyn and Letchworth proved less than successful. Nonetheless, in his elevation of the planning profession, in his primacy of the town-country magnet, and in the exclusory nature of his model communities that by definition were designed for only a few thousand, he and other planners anticipated later efforts to obtain perfected communities in the modern American West. Echoing these earlier visions, westerners experimented with the proper balance of individual creativity and private initiative, expert planning, and governmental authority in the construction of physical space and community identity. By the early twentieth century, every major western city had hired an urban planner who, more than likely, was familiar with the planning language and social philosophies espoused by Olmsted, Howard, and Bellamy.

As John Findlay's introductory chapter makes clear, some community-building enterprises in the twentieth-century West were consistent with earlier social movements in that they often involved efforts to avoid the perceived evils of industrial America through communalism.¹² The region's first utopian colonies had consisted of groups of people who possessed visions of idealized life and attempted to establish communities that modeled new social patterns that outsiders might follow. The essential element, for the West's early communitarians, was withdrawal from a modernizing America. These nineteenth-century settlers did not seek to transform American society but instead retreated to a home place where they might separate themselves from the larger society and begin anew.¹³

The other chapters herein reveal that twentieth-century urban, suburban, and exurban visionaries in the American West shifted from hopes of perfection and no longer sought isolation from consumer culture. Individuals did not believe that they could fully escape the realities of modern life, and most did not wish to. Rather, as the chapters suggest, the planners, government officials, business owners, residents, and tourists who shaped the region's cities during the twentieth century increasingly championed less idealistic visions of community. Developers, builders, and activists continued to plan idealized communities in the American West, but they also compromised pragmatically, creating new kinds of living spaces that played a role in the development of more modern and diverse urban identities. Like Ebenezer Howard, westerners wanted the best of both worlds—modern urban amenities in the midst of a garden. As John Findlay argues in Magic Lands, The urban West—with its central cities, suburbs, and nearby countryside—offered Americans a unique opportunity to live according to their preferences.¹⁴ Consequently, they began to shape their metropolitan landscapes into spatial and cultural middle grounds that encompassed the cultural enrichment of cities, the familiarity of suburbia, and a western wilderness aesthetic. The communities that emerged from these mottled landscapes were defined by place but also by what a specific place offered. In these communities, people found cohesion through restricted social space, common obligations, and shared experiences and interests.¹⁵

The shift away from urban planning that aimed at achieving alternative communitarian social philosophies was tied partly to a growing American assumption that successful, enjoyable metropolitan living depended on individual material acquisition and consumption. The new affluence and increased mobility of a modernizing nation meant that twentieth-century Americans sought additional, often more material, elements in their idealized communities. Affluence and mobility, consequently, created the necessary conditions for the rise and expansion of middle-class suburbs. As the twentieth century progressed, the majority of Americans placed their aspirations for financial security and community life on a home in suburbia. For Robert Fishman, the suburbs represented an attempt to create community through a collective vision of individual private property. Fishman argues in Bourgeois Utopias that suburban design expressed complex and compelling visions of the modern family freed from the corruption of the city, restored to harmony with nature, endowed with wealth and independence, yet protected by a close-knit, stable community.¹⁶ Suburban living represented a solution to Americans' long-standing discomfort with the historical processes of urbanization and community building. In their suburban dreams, Americans articulated a new vision of the good life, incorporating a pursuit of material goods rather than a search for a spiritual haven.¹⁷

Twentieth-century westerners increasingly believed that certain physical forms determined the nature of their communities and worked to incorporate the best of the city and the best of the country in their living space. Urban history has often focused on the metropolis as the quintessential urban form in the study of modernization and its impact, but this volume considers places that blur distinctions and people who sought identity through the modern consumer lifestyle in these places.¹⁸ At the same time, the terms of production have infiltrated the language and conceptualization of urban history, according to Lizabeth Cohen. With the advantages of modern technology, westerners did not abandon urban life but instead muddied the distinctions between traditional spaces, developing lifestyles that combined the benefits of rural environs with urbane features. The history of consumption has demonstrated how people have constructed identities through acquisitions. Likewise, westerners found social status in styles of living grounded in privileged space and material comfort. As physical space shaped identity, consumer behavior reshaped regional landscapes. Suburban and county governments developed a wide range of techniques to protect the land uses, lifestyles, and identities that constituted the western metropolitan ideal.¹⁹

However, identity in reformed or newly formed western communities relied on more than acquisition. Suburbs and exurbs often became exclusory places because a certain level of material comfort was beyond the means of large segments of the population. Others were denied access on the basis of race or gender discrimination.²⁰ Community development involved the establishment of social and cultural boundaries. By reshaping physical space, through planning and other activities, those in authority tried to eliminate supposed sources of disorder.²¹ While western suburbs remained comparatively more available to minorities than they had been in the Northeast or Midwest, exclusion remained important to the western suburban identity and offered a connection to the practices of earlier utopian efforts.²² New communities and city forms often reflected members' efforts to distance themselves from people and activities perceived as less desirable. In the American West, as elsewhere in the nation, people attempted to create small sanctuaries such as master-planned communities, wilderburbs, or exclusive tourist getaways. Consequently, westerners' identities were increasingly shaped by exclusive urban forms that enforced physical and cultural distance between residents and the other.

The westerners who are revealed in this book constructed diverse communities and metropolitan forms—cities, suburbs, university towns, mountain exurbs, amenity-rich tourist getaways, and politicized neighborhood enclaves—which they usually defined in opposition to other less desirable places. Convinced that western cities experienced fewer urban problems than their eastern and southern counterparts, westerners imagined their cities as dynamic, pliable places that were more easily transformed and improved.²³ Consequently, as they planned new towns or developed older ones within metropolitan regions, they often rejected the eastern models of cities and suburbs, constructing spaces and cultural identities that revealed alternative understandings of modern urbanity.

We have divided the thirteen chapters of this book into three parts. The first part, The Metropolitan Retreat to the Eco-Urban, explores the movement of middle-class and wealthy urban residents to sanctuaries on the metropolitan fringe—university towns and foothill communities. The second part, Tourism, Memory, and Western Urban Identities, contemplates the ways in which tourism shaped landscape and social status in the American West. The final part, From Cultural and Geographic Margins to Urban Centers, suggests that westerners who found themselves marginalized for their ethnicity or sexual orientation sometimes discovered social cohesion and shared identities in the urban cores and central city neighborhoods that previous inhabitants had deserted.

Taken as a whole, the chapters in this collection examine some of the ways that westerners conceptualized, built, and inhabited urban space in the twentieth century. As these narratives collectively demonstrate, the creation of a western urban ethos and new city forms was a contested process. As westerners tried to create livable urban communities, diverse voices championed frequently changing visions of a western urban ideal. Although their visions of an ideal community— whether urban, suburban, or exurban—were often compromised, new discourse and practices, including some fanciful thinking, led to social transformations and new political identities, crafted distinct regional urban forms, and created urban spaces where touristic fantasies could be acted out. These westerners sought safe havens and were eager to avoid their own versions of dystopia, places characterized in literature and popular culture by poverty, pollution, oppression, violence, or anonymity. In fiction such as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, urban spaces and authoritarian governments separated people from nature and its restorative powers.²⁴ Thus, some westerners found in the cities connections to a sanitized past or the chance for restoration and self-realization and sometimes expressed identities that would have brought them scorn elsewhere. In the end, the interconnectedness that defines the modern world perhaps has made the realization of isolated communities—whether within the city or outside its perimeter—little more than a myth. At the end of the twentieth century, the idealized communities that twentieth-century westerners had hoped to create grew more culturally diverse and politically complicated. They remained contested spaces and works in progress.

Notes

1. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (Boston: Ticknor, 1888), discussed in Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and La Corbusier, rev. ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 33.

2. This literary tradition includes classic works, such as Plato's Republic (ca. 360 BCE), St. Augustine's City of God (ca. 426), and Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516), and modern fantasies such as James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933). See Plato, The Republic, translated by Desmond Lee, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003); Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, translated by Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003); Sir Thomas More, Utopia (Leeds: Scholar Press, 1966); and James Hilton, Lost Horizon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, [1933]). See also Joseph Levine, Intellectual History as History, Journal of the History of Ideas 66 (April 2002): 189–200; and Barbara Goodwin, introduction to The Philosophy of Utopia, edited by Barbara Goodwin (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–9.

3. Robert V. Hine suggests that the expression ‘utopian' since the time of Thomas More has connoted unreality and impracticality…. But ‘utopian' also denotes an ideal to which men aspire, concrete and real to its proponents, though visionary to its detractors (California's Utopian Colonies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953], 4–5).

4. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis; and, The Great Instauration, rev. ed. by Jerry Weinberger (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Davidson, 1989).

5. Richard White, The Frontier in American Culture, in The Frontier in American Culture, edited by James R. Grossman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 25; Hine, California's Utopian Colonies, 9; Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Waltham, Mass.: Ginn, 1931). Contemporary scholars appropriately retreated from the ethnocentric aspects of Turner's thesis over the past century, while urban historians challenged his conclusion that cities were the final stage in frontier development. Rather, Richard Wade, William Cronon, and others argue that cities were at the forefront of Euro-American settlement. See Richard Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); and Kathleen A. Brosnan, Uniting Mountain and Plain: Urbanization, Law, and Environmental Change Along the Front Range (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002).

6. John Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 2.

7. Perhaps the most famous utopian venture in the West involved the Mormons' efforts to escape religious persecution and develop their unique urban community along the Wasatch Mountains in Utah. Although it deviated in some details, Salt Lake City called forth the square cities set in the middle of their agricultural lands and thus comprising the kind of rural-urban unit or city-state that (founder Joseph) Smith envisaged and Brigham Young later provided (John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992], 472). In its origins, it offered community members an identity defined by faith and grounded in entrepreneurial skill.

8. Greg Hise and William Deverell, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 8.

9. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, edited by F. J. Osborn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965). Regarding the Bellamy movement in the United States, see Hine, California's Utopian Colonies, 85–90, 161–64.

10. Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, 35–36.

11. Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 3–4. See also Cronon, Nature's Metropolis; Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Philip Dreyfus, Our Better Nature: Environment and the Making of San Francisco (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); and Richard A. Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of San Francisco (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).

12. Frances Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill: A Brilliant Exploration of Visionary Communities Remaking the American Dream (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Timothy Miller, The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America, 1900–1960 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 4–9.

13. Hine, California's Utopian Colonies, 5.

14. Findlay, Magic Lands, 2.

15. Bender, Communities and Social Change, 6–11.

16. Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books, 1987), x.

17. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 51.

18. James J. Connolly, Decentering Urban History: Peripheral Cities in the Modern World, Journal of Urban History 35 (November 2008): 3–4.

19. Lizabeth Cohen, Is There an Urban History of Consumption? Journal of Urban History 29 (December 2003): 87; Carl Abbott, The Suburban Sunbelt, Journal of Urban History 13 (May 1987): 286–87.

20. Margaret Garb emphasizes the importance of exclusion in the formation of urban neighborhoods in Drawing the ‘Color Line': Race and Real Estate in Early Twentieth- Century Chicago, Journal of Urban History 32 (July 2006): 773–87.

21. Patricia Burgess, Discovering Hidden Histories: The Identity of Place and Time, Journal of Urban History 26 (July 2000): 647.

22. Louise Nelson Dyble, Revolt Against Sprawl: Transportation and the Origins of the Marin County Growth-Control Regime, Journal of Urban History 34 (November 2007): 38–66; James S. Duncan and Nancy G. Duncan, Landscapes of Privilege: The Politics of the Aesthetic in an American Suburb (New York: Routledge, 2004), 4. Regarding minority suburban populations, see Abbott, The Suburban Sunbelt, 283.

23. Findlay, Magic Lands, 2.

24. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine, 1953); Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1932).

The Wishful West

JOHN M. FINDLAY

"Thus in the beginning all the world was America." John Locke's statement from his Second Treatise of Government (1690) exemplifies the pervasive European and Anglo-American perception of the New World, and especially its western reaches, as a tabula rasa. Not knowing what the West in fact contained, Europeans and Anglo-Americans have often been disposed to imagine the best-possible scenarios for this blank slate. So first Estevánico and then Coronado, in the late 1530s and early 1540s, toured the Southwest in search of the seven cities of Cíbola—the first utopias in the Southwest to seduce the nonnative imagination. And so Thomas Jefferson, in advising André Michaux in 1793 what to look for during a proposed exploration of the northern Rockies in search of the Northwest Passage, instructed the French naturalist to head up the Missouri River because it would seem by the latest maps as if a river called the Oregon [today's Columbia] interlocked with the Missouri for a considerable distance, and entered the Pacific Ocean not far southward of Nootka Sound.¹ What could have encouraged Jefferson to conceive that two river systems would miraculously interlock? How could Coronado have imagined seven golden cities on the desert and plains, each wealthier than the Aztec capital at Mexico City? Why did Locke construe the precontact Americas as a vacuum? Wishful thinking.

This chapter concerns one particular manifestation of wishful thinking. As blank slates, America in general and the West in particular have been especially attractive to those Europeans and Anglo-Americans bearing plans to create model communities. Puritans, proposing in the early seventeenth century to erect a city upon a hill, helped to set a precedent of blending westward migration with attempts at radical improvement to forms of community. Later groups saw blank slates not just in the regional environs but also in large swaths of urban fabric; wishful thinking applied to new towns as well as to new worlds. Since the 1840s utopian practice and utopian rhetoric defined the West as the most promising region in the country for implementing plans to perfect Americans' ability to live in communities. Bringing scholarship on American utopianism into conversation with scholarship on the urban West helps account for why utopian practice and utopian discourse have been constants west of the Missouri River, while also exploring how western utopianism developed in stages after 1840.

Note the distinction between utopian practice and utopian rhetoric. On the one hand, the West has hosted more than its share of America's utopian colonies. That is, the region became home to a disproportionate number of experimental communities, many conceived as models by which the larger society would be transformed. In most instances, these utopian colonies were located at some distance from cities, so it would be mistaken to claim that their influence on the urban West was always direct and forceful.

Utopian discourse, on the other hand, permeated thinking about western towns of all sizes. This discourse grew out of a long European tradition of imagining perfected forms of community, often rendered in literature about the future. Cities in the American West, in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, have been frequently conceived and reconceived—by boosters, planners, inhabitants, and others—in terms of such high expectation that the language about them has echoed that surrounding utopian colonies.

These two strains of western utopianism were not isolated from one another, although they are singled out here for analytical purposes. Utopian ideas and utopian colonies intersected in many ways, often in the same individuals, even though they represented divergent approaches to the project of perfecting society. It must be added that the decisive majority of utopian practice and discourse, in the United States as a whole and the West in particular, has been the product of white, mostly well-educated men. These utopians have advanced specific proposals for women, children, and people of color, but utopianism as described here (and primarily as found in the secondary literature) has largely been the product of relatively privileged people in American society. Even so, this particular form of wishful thinking has exerted a striking amount of influence on the West. And the West has had a significant influence on American utopianism.

Since the antebellum period western states and territories have played host to either a majority or a plurality of intentional communities in the United States. Robert V. Hine writes, More than one hundred communitarian experiments were started in America in the first half of the nineteenth century, and at least seventy-five percent of them were on the frontier of their day. Virtually none of the utopian ideas or residents originated on the frontier, to be sure; rather, coming from Europe and the East, they went to western soil to flourish.² Following the Civil War, the frontier still offered both land and social space for launching new ventures. Of the more than 140 cooperative colonies inventoried by Robert S. Fogarty for the period 1860–1914, more than half were located in the trans-Mississippi West. Although there are no reliable lists of American intentional communities for the first half of the twentieth century, Hine reports that between 1850 and 1950 California customarily led the nation in the number of utopian colonies, while Washington State generally ranked second, so one may speculate that the West continued to have more than its share of utopian colonies.³

A resurgence of communitarian activity after 1960 produced additional intentional communities. Timothy Miller has tabulated almost fourteen hundred communes for 1960–75; 40 percent of them were located in the Pacific states, and another 11 percent were located in the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states.⁴ In other words, more than half of America's utopian colonies in the 1960s and early 1970s lay west of the Missouri River. (In 1970, for the sake of comparison, the same region contained just over 26 percent of the U.S. population.) Finally, to try to bring matters more up-to-date, the 1995 edition of Communities Directory: A Guide to Cooperative Living located 44 percent of all intentional communities in the Plains, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific states. California ranked first among the fifty states with ninety-four, Washington stood third with twenty-seven, Colorado sixth with twenty-two, Arizona ninth with nineteen, and Oregon and Texas tied for twelfth with seventeen each.⁵ In sum, over the past two centuries successive Wests have had far more than their share of American utopian colonies.

What has accounted for the West's special relationship to intentional communities? In fact, certain frontier conditions—for example, the anti-intellectual climate, the remoteness from cosmopolitan centers—were not conducive to intentional communities. Yet most utopians went west anyway because they believed that they needed to withdraw from mainstream society in order to build a successful model for the future. More than any other region, the West has seemed to provide the isolation that utopians required. As a blank slate before wishful minds, writes Dolores Hayden, it has appeared to be a spatial vacuum on which hopeful idealists imposed an imaginary geography of fecundity, equality, and self-sufficiency. Moreover, socially the West has been assumed to be in its formative stages and therefore more susceptible than other regions to the reforming influence of a utopian colony. George Ripley, founder of Brook Farm in Massachusetts, explained in 1847: There is so much more pliability of habits and customs in a new country, than in one long settled, that an impression could far more easily be produced and a new direction far more easily given in the one than in the other. An Association which would create but little sensation in the East, might produce an immense effect in the West. Finally, communitarians expected not only that a malleable West would more likely be influenced by utopian colonies but also that its rapid rate of growth would ensure speedy diffusion once model communities had been adopted. In 1854 the French Fourierist Victor Considérant, upon creating a utopian colony in Texas, speculated: If the nucleus of the new society be implanted upon these soils, to-day a wilderness, and which tomorrow will be flooded with population, thousands of analogous organizations will rapidly arise without obstacle, and as if by enchantment around the first specimens.⁶

After the Civil War, even as the West grew more settled, utopians still subscribed to the belief that the region remained more receptive to model communities than other parts of the country. Communitarians (like most other Americans) have held on to the idea of a West of wide-open spaces and comparatively plastic, malleable institutions. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moreover, the appeal of the West's natural amenities heightened its reputation as a haven for intentional communities. Increasingly, utopian colonists recruited converts by advertising the attractions of the climate,…the fruitfulness of the land,…the garden that the cooperators would settle and help bring to blossom.⁷ As its population expanded, furthermore, the West produced more of its own utopian ideas and colonists, rather than relying so much on imports from the East and Europe, and those colonists spoke about their efforts in distinctly regional terms. The inhabitants of the experimental community of Llano del Rio, founded in Southern California in 1914, not only came primarily from west of the Rockies but also envisioned their influence in regional terms. They expected to see the colony repeated, multiplied, the Llano idea carried irresistibly throughout the west, conquering prejudice, spreading hope, extending the cooperative idea.⁸

Colonies such as Llano del Rio resulted in some measure from an affinity between expansion and utopianism that accompanied Americans' spread across North America but was much less characteristic of the colonizing efforts of European rivals. Simply put, the system of colonization employed by the United States gave greater encouragement to utopians because it offered more incentives and greater autonomy to nonelite migrants and because it entailed less centralized control. Of course, most westering Americans (particularly those heading toward areas where extractive economies prevailed) proved uninterested in communitarian experiments. Indeed, the greater individualism inherent in the American system of colonization likely produced a more atomistic society, yet that system also offered much wider latitude for individuals to coalesce into experimental communities.

Whereas utopias in the nineteenth-century United States drew heavily on ideas from across the Atlantic, European schemes of colonization proved inhospitable to utopians, as shown by examples on the Pacific Coast, because of their more centralized approach to controlling territory and because they offered minimal opportunity for nonelite migrants to shape communities to their own tastes. Eighteenth-century Spain colonized Alta California through the hierarchical institutions of the army and the Catholic Church, which created presidios and missions along the coast. It founded civilian communities only as an afterthought, and because these pueblos were created primarily to provision the presidios, they were constantly subject to military discipline. Russian colonization in Alaska proceeded in a somewhat similar fashion, with a czar-chartered monopoly (the Russian-American Company), the Russian Navy, and the Russian Orthodox Church running the show.

British fur traders on the Northwest coast, during the first half of the nineteenth century, best articulated the Europeans' more centralized approach that vigorously discouraged nonelite migrants from creating communities of their own making. The Old World philosophy was spelled out at midcentury in correspondence between officials of the Hudson's Bay Company over how to bring settlement to Vancouver Island. In 1849 chief factor James Douglas, the fur-trading company's top official on the scene, proposed giving parcels of two to three hundred acres to families willing to settle in the vicinity. Douglas had seen the appeal of free land to Americans in the Oregon Country and thought that the British would benefit by offering a comparable incentive to migrants. But writing from London, the governor of the Hudson's Bay Company strongly disapproved of the idea. The home office insisted upon a method of colonization that, rather than permit the kind of latitude that wishful individuals enjoyed under the American system, was designed to prevent any innovation that might upset the social order as understood back in England. The object of every sound system of colonization should be, not to re-organize Society on a new basis, which is simply absurd, but to transfer to the new country whatever is most valuable, and most approved in the institutions of the old, so that Society may, as far as possible consist of the same classes, united together by the same ties, and have the same relative duties to perform in the one country as in the other.⁹

British and American strategies for settling the North American West in some ways could not have been more different. The British wanted to avoid squatting on and speculating in land, while the American system encouraged it. The British wanted to transfer intact their system of social classes to the Pacific slope, while Americans outside the slave South mostly disapproved of such a system in the first place and expected that westward expansion would in any event weaken class lines. The British rejected as simply absurd the idea of reorganizing society on a new basis, while the more decentralized American system offered a seemingly endless supply of blank slates on which social reformers could draw up new societies. In the nineteenth century most westering Americans, like most Europeans, no doubt preferred to transplant to new countries the familiar institutions of the old society, but the U.S. colonizing system nonetheless proved much more tolerant of those who imagined that movement westward across the continent would entail experimentation with forms of community.

For many Americans, going west implied social progress. Writer Marilynne Robinson, in spite of her governing assumption that history is a dialectic of bad and worse, affirms the connection between migration and social reform running through much of U.S. history: "There was a Utopian impulse, the hope to create a model of a good human order, that seems to have arrived on the Mayflower, and which flourished through the whole of the nineteenth century…. The American frontier was what it was because it expressed a considerable optimism about what people were and what they might become. And this optimism continued into the twentieth century, by which time a strong connection had been made in many minds between mobility and uplift. The psychology of population movement (from east to west, as well as from rural to urban places, from urban to suburban places, and from one metropolitan area to another) made the West particularly receptive to utopian ideas. George W. Pierson has noted the distinct connection in American culture between movement and improvement." Whether moving away from something objectionable or moving toward something preferable (and utopians did both), westering people customarily anticipated a different and better life once they arrived at their destinations. This regional optimism in some ways grew even stronger after 1900, when the impulse to imitate the East diminished. Westerners increasingly found fault with eastern towns and more often viewed their own cities as places that could avoid the mistakes made elsewhere and produce communities more suited to the modern age as well as to the West's superior natural environs.¹⁰

What Robinson calls optimism about what people were and what they might become focused for the most part on the potential of adult white men (and, to a lesser extent, adult white women and white children) with some resources at their disposal. Yet other groups often came within the purview of Americans' utopian impulse. The architects of Indian reservations, when the institution was becoming the mainstay of U.S. policy during the mid-nineteenth century, drew upon the same thinking that inspired not only communitarians but also abolitionists, women's suffragists, and reformers of prisons and asylums during the antebellum era. Like Brook Farm or New Harmony, Indian reservations were imagined by some non-Indians as capable of solving a wide range of social problems. In 1853 a San Francisco newspaper, echoing the promises of federal agents, predicted that reservations would transform Indians within five years from a state of semi-barbarism, indolence, mental imbecility, and moral debasement, to the condition of civilization, Christianity, industry, virtue, frugality, social and domestic happiness, and public usefulness.¹¹

During the late 1870s the utopian movement merged with reservation policy in the person of Nathan Meeker. Meeker had explored and participated in utopian communities during the antebellum period. He also published a novel, The Life and Adventures of Capt. Jacob D. Armstrong (1852), in which a shipwrecked sailor persuades South Pacific natives to give up barbarism and adopt a Utopian civilization of modern arts and industries, stripped of all vice. A close association with newspaper editor Horace Greeley led in 1869 to Meeker's becoming the leader of the communitarian Union Colony at Greeley, Colorado. Within a few years the Union Colony drifted away from its founding principles and left Nathan Meeker in debt. Seeking to recover financially and continue his reform efforts, Meeker sought an appointment from the Office of Indian Affairs and in May 1878 was assigned to the White River Agency in northwestern Colorado. After rereading the works of French utopian philosopher Charles Fourier, rededicating himself to the principles of cooperation, and recruiting employees from the moribund Greeley experiment, Meeker set out to make the Ute Indians his next utopian project. At the White River Agency, Meeker's ideals collided head-on with the intractable problems of reservation policy; his curt, brusque, impatient manner only made matters worse. Bemoaning the glacial pace of acculturation, and seeking to accelerate the conversion of the pastoral Natives to farming, Meeker created a demonstration field in 1879 by ordering that a Ute corral and pasture be plowed. Natives responded with hostility, and Meeker, increasingly fearing for the safety of his family and employees, summoned the military. In the ensuing skirmishes the Utes torched the Indian agency and shot, killed, and mutilated Meeker.¹² One person's utopia all too easily became another person's