The Communistic Societies of the United States: From Personal Visit and ObservationNordhoff, Charles
History
The Communistic Societies of the United States: From Personal Visit and Observation
Nordhoff, Charles
Collective settlements -- United States
Somewhat over a mile from the home place are the factories of the
community--consisting of trap works, silk works, a forge, and machine
shops. These are thoroughly fitted with labor-saving machinery, and are
extensive enough to produce three hundred thousand traps, and the value
of over two hundred thousand dollars' worth of silk-twist in a year.
Near these workshops is a dwelling inhabited by thirty or forty of the
communists, who are particularly employed in the shops.
The farm has been put in excellent order: there are extensive orchards
of large and small fruits; and plantations of ornamental trees shelter
the lawn about the dwelling. This lawn is in summer a favorite resort
for picnic parties from a distance. As Sunday-school picnics are also
brought hither, I judge that the hostility which once existed in the
neighborhood to the Oneida Communists has disappeared. Indeed, at Oneida
all with whom I had occasion to speak concerning the communists praised
them for honesty, fair dealing, a peaceable disposition, and great
business capacity.
Their system of administration is perfect and thorough. Their
book-keeping--in which women are engaged as well as men, a young woman
being the chief--is so systematized that they are able to know the
profit or loss upon every branch of industry they pursue, as well as the
cost of each part of their living.
They have twenty-one standing committees: on finance; amusements;
patent-rights; location of tenant houses; arbitration; rents; baths,
walks, roads, and lawns; fire; heating; sanitary; education; clothing;
real estate and tenant houses; water-works and their supplies; painting;
forest; water and steam power; photographs; hair-cutting; arcade; and
Joppa--the last being an isolated spot on Oneida Lake, to which they go
to bathe, fish, shoot, and otherwise ruralize.
Besides these, they divide the duties of administration among
forty-eight departments: _Circular;_ publication; silk manufacture;
hardware; fruit-preserving; paper-box; printing; dyeing; carpentry;
business office; shoe shop; library; photographs; educational; science
and art; laundry; furniture; legal; subsistence; Wallingford printing;
agriculture; horticulture; medical; incidentals; dentistry; real estate;
musical; amusements; quarry; housekeeping; repairs; traveling; watches;
clocks; tin shop; porterage; lights; livery; clothing; stationery;
floral; water-works; children's; landscape; forests; heating; bedding;
coal.
At first view these many committees and departments may appear cumbrous;
but in practice they work well.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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