Postmaster General James A Farley�s famous toast �to the forty-seven states and the soviet of Washington� introduces and sets the tone for this study of Washington State radicalism. The state�s colorful reputation for radical movements was established in the 1920s and 1930s by free speech fights, strikes, strong labor organizations, and woman suffrage reforms. Charles LeWarne finds the roots of this radicalism in the communitarian experiments of the late nineteenth century. Through analyses of several of these experiments, LeWarne demonstrates that the influence of a coterie of liberals and radicals centered on Puget Sound in such communities as Home, Burley, Freeland, Equality, and Port Angeles was felt in the state long after the �utopias� they came to colonize had ceased to exist. Probably the most famous of the experiments was Home Colony on Joe�s Bay near Tacoma. From a nucleus of three families, Home grew to over two hundred residents and lasted for more than twenty years. Its reputation for anarchism and flamboyance contributed to a jail sentence conviction for one editor of the Home newspaper for publishing an editorial called �The Nude and the Prudes.� Readers interested in current social movements and lifestyles will find many enlightening parallels with recent communal attempts, particularly the rejection of traditional values and the belief in a perfectible world. Whatever the differences within individual colonies, the communitarian ideal has certain general characteristics that find their way into each of these attempts to form a perfect society. Historians will welcome this treatment of an important part of the social and cultural history of the area. The book contains a mine of previously scattered information on the subject. It is a delightful footnote to the history of the Puget Sound region.

Utopian ventures are worth close attention, to help us understand why some succeed and others fail, for they offer hope for an improved life on earth. Utopias and Utopians is a comprehensive guide to utopian communities and their founders. Some works look at literary utopias or political utopias, etc., and others examine the utopias of only one country: this work examines utopias from antiquity to the present and surveys utopian efforts around the world. Of more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries roughly half are descriptions of utopian ventures; the other half are biographies of those who were involved. Entries are followed by a list of sources and a general bibliography concludes the volume.

The true story of an anarchist colony on a remote Puget Sound peninsula, Trying Home traces the history of Home, Washington, from its founding in 1896 to its dissolution amid bitter infighting in 1921. As a practical experiment in anarchism, Home offered its participants a rare degree of freedom and tolerance in the Gilded Age, but the community also became notorious to the outside world for its open rejection of contemporary values. Using a series of linked narratives, Trying Home reveals the stories of the iconoclastic individuals who lived in Home, among them Lois Waisbrooker, an advocate of women's rights and free love, who was arrested for her writings after the assassination of President McKinley; Jay Fox, editor of The Agitator, who defended his right to free speech all the way to the Supreme Court; and Donald Vose, a young man who grew up in Home and turned spy for a detective agency. Justin Wadland weaves his own discovery of Home--and his own reflections on the concept of home--into the story, setting the book apart from a conventional history. After discovering the newspapers published in the colony, Wadland ventures beyond the documents to explore the landscape, travelling by boat along the steamer route most visitors once took to the settlement. He visits Home to talk with people who live there now. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Trying Home will fascinate scholars and general readers alike, especially those interested in the history of the Pacific Northwest, utopian communities, and anarchism.

Winner of the Malstrom Award of the League of Snohomish County Historical Organizations In 1968, a time of turbulence and countercultural movements, a one-time television salesman named Paul Erdmann changed his name to Love Israel and started a controversial religious commune in Seattle's middle-class Queen Anne Hill neighborhood. He quickly gathered a following and they too adopted the Israel surname, along with biblical or virtuous first names such as Honesty, Courage, and Strength. The burgeoning Love Israel Family lived a communal lifestyle centered on meditation and the philosophy that all persons were one and life was eternal. They flourished for more than a decade, owning houses and operating businesses on the Hill, although rumors of drug use, control of members, and unconventional sexual arrangements dogged them. By 1984, perceptions among many followers that some Family members - especially Love Israel himself - had become more equal than others led to a bitter breakup in which two-thirds of the members defected. The remaining faithful, about a hundred strong, resettled on a ranch the Family retained near the town of Arlington, Washington, north of Seattle. There they recouped and adapted, with apparent social and economic success, for two more decades. In The Love Israel Family, Charles LeWarne tells the compelling story of this group of idealistic seekers whose quest for a communal life grounded in love, service, and obedience to a charismatic leader foundered when that leader's power distanced him from his followers. LeWarne followed the Family for years, attending its celebrations and interviewing the faithful and the disaffected alike. He tells the Family's story with both sympathy and balance, describing daily life in the urban and later the rural communes and explaining the Family's deeply felt spiritual beliefs. The Love Israel Family is an important chapter in the history of communal experiments in the United States.

From the Shakers to the Branch Davidians, America's communal utopians have captured the popular imagination. Seventeen original essays here demonstrate the relevance of such groups to the mainstream of American social, religious, and economic life. The contributors examine the beliefs and practices of the most prominent utopian communities founded before 1965, including the long-overlooked Catholic monastic communities and Jewish agricultural colonies. Also featured are the Ephrata Baptists, Moravians, Shakers, Harmonists, Hutterites, Inspirationists of Amana, Mormons, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, Janssonists, Theosophists, Cyrus Teed's Koreshans, and Father Divine's Peace Mission. Based on a new conceptual framework known as developmental communalism, the book examines these utopian movements throughout the course of their development--before, during, and after their communal period. Each chapter includes a brief chronology, giving basic information about the group discussed. An appendix presents the most complete list of American utopian communities ever published. The contributors are Jonathan G. Andelson, Karl J. R. Arndt, Pearl W. Bartelt, Priscilla J. Brewer, Donald F. Durnbaugh, Lawrence Foster, Carl J. Guarneri, Robert V. Hine, Gertrude E. Huntington, James E. Landing, Dean L. May, Lawrence J. McCrank, J. Gordon Melton, Donald E. Pitzer, Robert P. Sutton, Jon Wagner, and Robert S. Weisbrot.

One of early-twentieth-century America’s most fertile grounds for political radicalism, the Pacific Northwest produced some of the most dedicated and successful socialists the country has ever seen. As a radicalized labor force emerged in mining, logging, and other extractive industries, socialists employed intensive organizational and logistical skills to become an almost permanent third party that won elections and shook the confidence of establishment rivals. At the height of Socialist Party influence just before World War I, a Montana member declared, “They are all red out here.” In this first book to fully examine the development of the American Socialist Party in the Northwest, Jeffrey A. Johnson draws a sharp picture of one of the most vigorous left-wing organizations of this era. Relying on party newspapers, pamphlets, and correspondence, he allows socialists to reveal their own strategies as they pursued their agendas in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. And he explores how the party gained sizable support in Butte, Spokane, and other cities seldom associated today with left-wing radicalism. “They Are All Red Out Here” employs recent approaches to labor history by restoring rank-and-file workers and party organizers as active participants in shaping local history. The book marks a major contribution to the ongoing debate over why socialism never grew deep roots in American soil and no longer thrives here. It is a work of political and labor history that uncovers alternative social and political visions in the American West.

Practically since the turn of the century, the Northwest has been a region of paradoxes. Women, who in Washington had acquired suffrage and lost it in the 1880s, regained it and later elected a woman mayor of Seattle. Exploitation of workers, despite, or perhaps because of, abundance has been extreme-- and has engendered some of America's most radical labor movements. Both racial backlash and enlightened reforms characterize the region.

American history is filled with moments of grave moral doubt and institutional crisis, with conflicts over fundamental values, with ethical dilemmas and paradoxes. This volume surveys the moral landscape of the American past from slavery to the Vietnam War. Bringing together fourteen of the most original historians practicing today, the book illuminates a critical dimension of American history, even as it shows how historical study contributes to present-day debates about values and the moral life.These essays examine a wide range of questions that have engaged past generations of Americans and persist into the present—questions about the composition of a moral community and the case for civil disobedience, about the appropriate responses to injustices and inequalities, and about the ethical implications of artistic expression, school curricula, sexual behaviors, and popular media. Focusing on the impact of moral problems on everyday experience, the authors consider these questions in light of reform movements and religious practices; changing social institutions such as marriage, public schools, labor unions, and penitentiaries; and enduring moral forces from the Bible to the U.S. Constitution. Together their essays give historical context to a wide variety of American practices and beliefs and, in doing so, provide a new framework for understanding cultural life.

Seeking to reclaim a history that has remained largely ignored by most historians, this dramatic and stirring account examines each of the definitive American cooperative movements for social change—farmer, union, consumer, and communalist—that have been all but erased from collective memory. Focusing far beyond one particular era, organization, leader, or form of cooperation, For All the People documents the multigenerational struggle of the American working people for social justice. While the economic system was in its formative years, generation after generation of American working people challenged it by organizing visionary social movements aimed at liberating themselves from what they called wage slavery. Workers substituted a system based on cooperative work and constructed parallel institutions that would supersede the institutions of the wage system. With an expansive sweep and breathtaking detail, this scholarly yet eminently readable chronicle follows the American worker from the colonial workshop to the modern mass-assembly line, from the family farm to the corporate hierarchy, ultimately painting a vivid panorama of those who built the United States and those who will shape its future. John Curl, with over forty years of experience as both an active member and scholar of cooperatives, masterfully melds theory, practice, knowledge, and analysis, to present the definitive history from below of cooperative America. This second edition contains a new introduction by Ishmael Reed; a new author’s preface discussing cooperatives in the Great Recession of 2008 and their future in the 21st century; and a new chapter on the role co-ops played in the Food Revolution of the 1970s.

The United States is the only modern nation in which communes have continuously existed for the past two hundred years. This definitive history of communes in America examines the major factors that have supported the existence and growth of communes throughout American history. The most impressive survey of the communal experience since the works of Noyes and Nordhoff, it is informed by a deep respect for the human subjects and organizational forms of American communes. The findings in the analytical chapters are of considerably theoretical import beyond the historical narrative.Oved details the founding, growth, development, and sometimes failure of alternative societies from 1735 to 1939: Icaria, Ephrata, Oneida, Shaker, religious, secular, and socialist communes. Extensive reference material cited will assure this work a special place in the archives of the literature on communes.