Noyes married Harriet in their native Vermont, a full decade before leading his flock to Oneida. While his proposal isn’t one of history’s great love letters — I’ve received more sentimental invoices from my attorney — Noyes’s sympathy for Harriet’s childbearing heartbreaks early on in their marriage had a profound influence on the future sexual practices at Oneida, specifically what he came to call “male continence,” a sexual technique that’s about as fun as it sounds.
Harriet gave birth five times in six years but only one of those children lived. “This experience was what directed my studies and kept me studying,” Noyes later recalled. “After our last disappointment I pledged my word to my wife that I would never again expose her to such fruitless suffering.” At first, Noyes recounts, he simply vowed not to touch her. Then it occurred to him that genitalia have two functions — the reproductive (which led to the aforementioned catastrophes) and the social. He concluded that one function has little to do with the other and that he could eliminate the possibility of eggs being fertilized by not ejaculating. “I experimented on this idea,” he wrote, “and found that the self-control which it requires is not difficult; that my enjoyment was increased; that my wife’s experience was very satisfactory, as it had never been before; that we had escaped the horrors and the fear of involuntary propagation.”
Noyes broke down the sex act into three parts — the beginning, marked by “the simple presence of the male organ in the female,” the middle, involving “a series of reciprocal motions,” and of course the end, an “ejaculatory crisis which expels the seed.” Naturally, one’s thoughts turn to canoeing. Noyes described sex as a day trip to the nearby Niagara River. “The skilled boatman,” he asserts, will learn “the wisdom of confining his excursions to the region of easy rowing.” If not, it’s over the falls, and splat.
At the Oneida Community, not ejaculating wasn’t just a hobby. It was a whole way of life. In fact, Noyes points out, “The Oneida Community in an important sense owed its existence to the discovery of Male Continence.” At its core, the community was about sharing — sharing love, sex, food, chores, money, decisions, time. The only thing the Oneida men were supposed to keep to themselves was their sperm. When I ask Valesky why masturbation was also frowned upon, he replies, “Self-pleasuring takes you away from the group.”
One of the corollaries of Noyes’s theory of group marriage was a taboo against “special love” and a system of defenses to guard against all kinds of intense passion. Consider the following set of problems and the ingenious way in which they were solved. Young people were always getting crushes. Young people only want to sleep with one another. Older people would like to enjoy sex but they aren’t as attractive as younger people. Oneida men are supposed to practice male continence, but perfecting male continence takes practice, and until teenage boys learn how to control themselves, their female partners are in danger of impregnation. So here’s what they did. Post-menopausal women deflowered young boys. That way, conception is avoided and older women enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. Young girls, annoyingly prone to falling in love, were ushered into womanhood by an older male, usually by an experienced boater like Noyes himself. And, if his proposal to Harriet is any indication, Noyes had a knack for deflecting mushy sentiment by making a girl feel like part of a team.
The admonition against special love meant not only a ban on falling in love. It applied to all expressions of over-the-top passion. For example, a little girl who had grown too fond of her favorite doll was marched into the kitchen and told to toss it into the fire. A gifted violin player in danger of becoming a virtuoso and thus too attached to his instrument handed it over to the Oneida authorities and never played again. When a visiting Canadian teacher complained that the community did not foster “genius or special talent,” Noyes was delighted, replying, “We never expected or desired to produce a Byron, a Napoleon, or a Michelangelo.” You know you’ve reached a new plateau of group mediocrity when even a Canadian is alarmed by your lack of individuality.
Where did the other violinists — the ones who were kind of good but not too good — perform? Valesky ushers me into the grand room he says came to be known as the family hall, “a re-created nineteenth-century opera house. This,” he says, “is the only room that could hold the entire population and more, because almost three hundred people were living here. But beyond that, this was a very public room, so the public was invited to come to various performances given by community members. They had an orchestra, they had a choir, they did little operas, operettas, band concerts, chamber music.”
Every night, Valesky says, the group assembled here for a family meeting in which Noyes led them in discussions of spiritual and business issues. Valesky points at a pleasant old photograph of the room, in which people are sitting in rocking chairs or knitting or both. But before enjoying the evening’s aggressively second-rate entertainment, they would engage in what they thought of as a cleansing ritual, the enchantingly named Mutual Criticism.
Mutual Criticism required a member of the group to stand up in front of everybody and listen to the enumeration of his or her faults. The bright side of being that night’s subject for criticism was the rare treat at Oneida of being the center of attention. The downside was that everyone you knew and loved was allowed, even encouraged, to look into your eyes and ask, “You know what your problem is?”
Reading the accounts of community members’ moments in the critical sun, one thing that stands out is how specific the criticisms were. A young man was told that he didn’t read enough and that when he did he only “skims things.” A guy’s guy was picked on for his masculinity because “there is not woman enough about him.” Though my personal favorite is the New Englander who was taken to task for his “too frequent mention of Vermont.”
Despite its harshness, Mutual Criticism cleared the air, disinfecting the tension that necessarily breeds when human beings live in such close proximity. Perhaps everyone’s family unit or roommates should engage in the practice from time to time. I am imagining how my sister might have relished a ritualistic opportunity to discuss my flaws and how they affected her, such as my childhood tic of involuntarily humming aloud that went on throughout the Carter administration which in itself is bad enough until one recalls that my humming coincided with the heyday of “You Light Up My Life.”
While a nuclear family is capable of low-key but toxic resentment, a commune is Three Mile Island waiting to happen. In Sleeping Where I Fall, his memoir of living on an anarchist collective farm in California in the 1960s, Peter Coyote admits to the way his annoyance with his fellow communards sometimes trumped his laissez-faire ideals, leading him to tape up a list of house rules including, “It’s fine if you want to take speed, just don’t talk to me!”
Regarding Mutual Criticism, Valesky proclaims, “It would relate to personality issues, the whole idea being maintaining group stability, group harmony. Resolving conflicts would all be done by the group such that at the end, there would be a feeling that something has been discussed that needed to be.”
Standing in the room where the Mutual Criticism took place, Valesky and I conjecture about how the process went for future assassin Charles Guiteau. (In the glossary of a children’s book about the Garfield assassination, one of the vocabulary words kids are supposed to learn by studying Guiteau is “nuisance.”)
“Well,” Valesky replies, “he was here from 1860 to 1865. Then he left and came back. From what I’ve read, he was pretty annoying. He was not happy. And yet he stayed here for five years. And they let him come back and then he tries to sue them.”
Considering that Oneida’s group marriage policy theoretically promised constant sexual trysts, unfortunately for Guiteau those trysts had to be consensual. That no one wanted to sleep with Charles Guiteau is hinted at in his Oneida nickname, “Charles Gitout.” After he moved away, moved back, then moved away again to New York City, Guiteau launched a vicious lawsuit against the community, alleging that Noy
es’s practice of initiating the adolescent girls into womanhood was stunting their growth, producing a generation of sexual dwarves.
Guiteau’s Noyes-worshiping father was embarrassed enough about the lawsuit to write letters to New York newspapers denouncing his son and praising the Oneida Community. Noyes, whose own son was living in a mental institution at the time, wrote to Luther Guiteau, “I have no ill will toward [Charles]. I regard him as insane, and I prayed for him last night as sincerely as I ever prayed for my own son, that is now in a Lunatic Asylum.” Soon thereafter, Luther Guiteau would reach the same conclusion, that Charles should be committed but for the lack of money to pay for it. This is important. Besides sparing the Oneida Community some grief, if Guiteau had received proper treatment from mental health professionals in a caring, padded facility with locks on the doors, it might have spared James Garfield’s life.
Here’s a distraction. When researching Luther Guiteau’s take on his son’s stay at Oneida, I couldn’t help but notice that in his letters he refers to the Oneida Community as “the O.C.” Coincidentally, The O.C. is the name of a nighttime soap opera on television’s Fox network I am currently obsessed with. Set in Orange County, California, the show’s three biggest stars are Peter Gallagher and Peter Gallagher’s legendary pair of eyebrows, eyebrows cozy enough to move into — a home, a couple of rocking chairs with a nose between them like a table piled high with every book you ever loved. And thus, when I see the Oneida Community being referred to as “the O.C.,” I cannot help but picture all the ladies of Oneida standing in line to curl up in Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows, trying in vain not to feel a special love. (The subject of Peter Gallagher’s eyebrows, I realize, is a digression away from the Oneida Community, and yet, I do feel compelled, indeed almost conspiracy theoretically bound to mention that one of the reasons the Oneida Community broke up and turned itself into a corporate teapot factory is that a faction within the group, led by a lawyer named James William Towner, was miffed that the community’s most esteemed elders were bogarting the teenage virgins and left in a huff for none other than Orange County, California, where Towner helped organize the Orange County government, became a judge, and picked the spot where the Santa Ana courthouse would be built, a courthouse where, it is reasonable to assume, Peter Gallagher’s attorney character on The O.C. might defend his clients.)
At Oneida, Charles Guiteau’s turns at Mutual Criticism scrutiny repeatedly elicited accusations of “egotism and conceit.” This is easy to believe considering that Guiteau’s delusions of grandeur would later inspire him to write a book with the immodest title The Truth, to say nothing of his belief that President Garfield would appoint him as ambassador to France even though at the time he was a dotty unemployed zero.
One learns more about the Oneida Community by considering Charles Guiteau than the other way around. There are Oneida traits in Guiteau for sure. He always credited the community with inspiring his abstinence from liquor and profanity. He plagiarized Noyes in some of his loony later speeches, especially the bits about the second coming of Christ in 70 A.D. But really, the fact that the commune put up with such an exasperating egomaniac for five full years speaks volumes about the Oneida Community’s capacity for tolerance. Pondering this, Valesky says, “That’s an interesting part of my understanding of what went on here. If that kind of an individual could be accepted and maintain a relationship here as long as he did, it’s remarkable.”
One impulse Guiteau shared with his Oneida fellows was a yearning to be part of a group, to commune. Even his most deliriously selfish act — overturning the will of the electorate by shooting the president — was conceived and executed as a tribute to the Stalwart faction within the Republican Party. After he did it he proclaimed, “I am a stalwart of the Stalwarts.”
As we stand in Oneida’s family hall, Joe Valesky tells me that when he first volunteered as a guide here, he spent a lot of time thinking about the men and women who came here to lead such eccentric lives. “What was it like when these people were born in that generation of Americans?” he wondered, continuing, “So at that point I came across Jonathan Edwards and his sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’ Do you know it?”
Do I ever. Written in 1741, Edwards’s sermon describes us sinners as spiders the Creator dangles over the mouth of hell. “The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow.” I love this sermon as literature because its diabolical lingo is so grim, so harrowing that it’s almost cute. Wasn’t so cute in yesteryear. Valesky says, “Your first definition of you as a woman, me as a man is that we are sinners. You are a sinner. I’m a sinner. You look at God. What are you seeing? An angry god — ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.’ ”
Valesky says that thinking about that sermon and its notion that human beings are arachnids God is about to flip into a fire helps him understand that the ways of the Oneida Community, in which heaven is already here, “was like this incredible shot of oxygen. Because we’re not so evil. That is behind us. God doesn’t have to be angry.”
Interesting. I have this recurring nightmare in which I have to move back in with my old college roommates. I’ll admit, that’s what I was expecting to find at Oneida — the nineteenth-century equivalent of sharing a house with the friend who brought home a crazy drifter to sleep on our couch, a man who claimed the local car dealership was built out of “needles nourishing the earth.” The week before I went to Oneida I had that claustrophobic dream again, that I had to move back in with the girl who claimed to enjoy baking and always promised tomorrow was going to be muffin day even though tomorrow was never muffin day — it was muffin day maybe once. But Valesky inspired me to think about the claustrophobia of American culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, how women like me would have given anything for a freewheeling life with Drifter Magnet and Muffin Day instead of being doomed to a choice between Mother Superior and Husband Your Parents Picked. How reassuring it must have been to have this place, to know that it was here. If I had never gone to Oneida and talked to Joe Valesky, if I had simply read a book about the community and bought my Oneida teapot at Macy’s Herald Square, I might have thought about fornicating utopians as I brewed Earl Grey, but now, when I watch the steam rise from the yellow spout, I like to pretend I’m seeing people breathe.
When James Garfield, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, left the 1880 convention to return to his farm in Mentor, he was under the impression that he was running against Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock. His true opponent, however, was his fellow Republican, Senator Roscoe Conkling. Garfield had barely been home long enough to hire extra help for his beet harvest when Conkling was summoning him to New York for a meeting of the Republican National Committee.
“I am very reluctant to go,” Garfield complained to his diary on July 28, 1880. “It is an unreasonable demand that so much effort should be made to conciliate one man.” But New York was 1880’s battleground state. Garfield couldn’t win without New York and he couldn’t win New York without Conkling. So, for the good of the party, he swallowed his pride and reserved a room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
The Fifth Avenue Hotel, on the corner of Twenty-third, housed the New York Republican Party headquarters. It was there Chester Alan Arthur kept his office. It was there the party faithful assembled throughout the 1880 campaign, including the eccentric political gadfly Charles J. Guiteau. The building was torn down in 1908. These days, the site is home to the International Toy Center. A plaque noting the location’s former glory is all that’s left of Garfield and Arthur.
The hotel would become famous, if you can call anything related to Garfield famous, as the site of the Fifth Avenue Summit, a private meeting among Garfield and various squabbling Stalwarts, including Roscoe Conkling’s lieutenants, VP nominee Chester Arthur and New York’s junior senator, Tom Platt. What the men agreed to h
as been lost to history. Three things, however, are clear: Garfield left the room believing he had not mortgaged his future to the Stalwarts, the Stalwarts left the room believing Garfield had agreed to let them control the Treasury appointment in the cabinet (and thus the almighty New York Custom House), and Roscoe Conkling had the audacity to never step foot in the room at all. At the end of the day, Garfield’s diary reports, “The absence of Senator Conkling gave rise to unpleasant surmises as to his attitude. His friends were embarrassed and somewhat indignant.” In other words, Conkling commanded the future commander in chief to New York so as to boss him around and then, though Conkling was staying in the same hotel, he didn’t have the courtesy to boss Garfield around in person.
Years later, statues of Chester Arthur and Roscoe Conkling were erected across the street in Madison Square Park. Arthur, who became president after Garfield’s assassination, is designated as President Chester Alan Arthur on the base of his monument so as to jog the memory of the joggers passing by — Chester who? Conkling’s statue, by comparison, wears no such name tag. “Roscoe Conkling” is all that’s chiseled at his feet, as if to taunt, “Don’t you know who I am?” He ran this town, this state, the whole country sometimes, and now, standing catty-corner from a Dunkin’ Donuts, the only attention he is paid is from the dogs and drunks peeing at his granite shoes.