The 19th-Century Cult That Gave Rise to an Incel Assassin

Susan Wels’s “An Assassin in Utopia” links President Garfield’s killer to the atmosphere of free love and religious fervor that gripped Oneida, N.Y., in the late 1800s.

Mattie Kahn

New York Times

February. 3, 2023

AN ASSASSIN IN UTOPIA: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder, by Susan Wels

What do an experiment in free love, a renowned newspaper editor with a penchant for the occult, and a dour — then murdered — president have in common?

That’s the question that the prolific historian Susan Wels poses in “An Assassin in Utopia,” which explores the interwoven fates of the radical preacher John Humphrey Noyes, the media impresario Horace Greeley and the doomed James A. Garfield, who was shot four months into his tenure as president of the United States and died of infection two months later. It spoils none of the rollicking pleasures of the book to reveal that the answer is a proto-incel named Charles Julius Guiteau, so let’s set him aside for the moment.

Instead, we can start as Wels does, with the spiritual awakening of Noyes and his ensuing desire to establish a model of communal living based on audacious religious doctrine. Among his precepts: Monogamous relationships are a perversion of God’s will; marriage is a group effort, involving numerous sexual relationships with an unlimited number of partners; men and women alike should work and participate in all household responsibilities. Additionally, it is the sacred task of older men and women to “initiate” the post-pubescent, and birth control is the sole responsibility of men — who are expected to become proficient in the tantric art of “male continence.”

From the start, Noyes horrified more conventional Christians. But the once-timid theologian had graduated from Dartmouth and Yale and come to the same conclusion that countless alumni have since: He was “a perfect human being, incapable of sin.” Noyes launched two newspapers to spread his ideology, financed by his heiress wife, Harriet. He established what came to be known as Oneida in 1848, having acquired 23 acres of land from one of his disciples.

Oneida was unique in its particulars, but between 1800 and 1860, the United States saw over 70 utopian experiments; central New York was such an epicenter for religious fever that it was christened the Burned-Over District. Oneida might have had its scandals — but then, its neighbor was an enclave called the Kingdom of Matthias. “In a ritual called the ‘Fountain of Eden,’” Wels writes, “members … would surround him, naked, in a circle while Matthias sluiced them with a sponge and declared them virgins.”

Fascinating though Oneida is, it’s but one element of this portrait of an era. Each towering figure — preacher, newspaperman, president — gets the biographical treatment. So too does Charles Guiteau. Guiteau joined Oneida in 1860, claiming “an irresistible power” attracted him to the community. He found the supposed paradise disappointing, not least because none of its women would sleep with him. He left in 1863, confident he was destined for greatness. Guiteau lasted three months on the outside. He was readmitted to Oneida on a trial basis, but was no happier.

In 1866, Guiteau moved to New York City and became obsessed with Greeley, whom he wanted to help elect president. When Greeley died, he fixated on a series of Republican politicians. Guiteau ultimately became convinced that Garfield — who won the presidential election of 1880 — had sold out his most committed supporters. Desperate for fame, Guiteau concluded that the president must die. He plotted. He schemed. He shot Garfield twice. Reporters soon linked Guiteau to Oneida, and gleefully charged the lurid social experiment with stoking the assassin’s fanaticism.

For decades, Noyes had operated Oneida with total control. He built out its enterprises, opened its grounds to interested visitors, approved sexual liaisons between members and fathered several children — once with one of his nieces. He slept with whomever he pleased, including teenage girls.

ut in 1865, he went too far even for his obedient flock: He decided to dabble in eugenics. He christened it “stirpiculture,” and ruled that only he and his inner circle would decide which Oneidans were permitted to “breed.” Faith faltered.

By 1879, matters had deteriorated further. Noyes heard that he would soon be arrested for his sexual misdeeds, and he fled to Canada. Without Noyes at the helm of the community, suspicion and mistrust took root; Oneida gradually morphed from radical cult to watered-down kibbutz. The concept of “complex marriage” was abolished, and Oneidans entered monogamous relationships. The fabled Mansion House where members lived and worked was divided up into rental units.

The sudden overhaul must have shaken the old-timers. Readers will perhaps arrive at the end of Wels’s complicated tale experiencing a similar kind of dizziness — the whoosh of overindulgence. This is a book to be sidled up to like a buffet: Know that it sometimes groans under the weight of its varied delights. Margaret Fuller — journalist, critic and Transcendentalist — drops in for a chapter. Wels traces the rise of P.T. Barnum and the fall of Reconstruction. She chronicles the ascendance of the Fox sisters, two spiritualists who claimed to be in communion with ghosts.

I inhaled asides about Kate Chase, the “toast of Washington,” and Susan Edson, the first female doctor in the capital. Wels’s expert and well-paced dissection of post-Civil War politics so sated me that the eventual — and titular — turn to the president’s actual assassination arrived like a second main course; I almost didn’t need it. At the same time, I might have made space for a deeper examination of the abuses suffered at Oneida; incest and sex with minors are mentioned with brisk matter-of-factness.

Still, Wels’s kaleidoscopic romp is an undeniable thrill. In a recent reconsideration of Oneida, one writer saw its impact in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the advent of modern birth control. We can find Oneida too in contemporary considerations of what it means to find fulfillment in work and love. Perhaps even the disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried — whose rumored romantic entanglements are the stuff of flowcharts — owes something to Noyes.

Oneida still exists as a museum, and in the form of the silverware company its members founded almost two centuries ago. A recent promotion on its website offered an additional 25 percent off sale items with the code “FORKIT.” With discount innuendo, Eden lives on as a corporation.

Mattie Kahn is the author of the upcoming “Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions.”

AN ASSASSIN IN UTOPIA: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder | By Susan Wels | 283 pp. | Illustrated | Pegasus Crime | $27.95

A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 12, 2023, Page 17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Sex and Violence

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/books/review/an-assassin-in-utopia-susan-wels.html

Escaping Utopia; A Conversation with Janja Lalich

Generation Cult
Episode 8
October 26, 2018

We had a visit from Dr. Janja Lalich, an author and educator who has a new book out about children raised in cults called "Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out and Starting Over." Janja chats with us about her research for this project as well as her time working and writing with the late Margaret Singer, a prominent psychologist known for her studies on undue influence.

Listen to podcast

http://directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/id/7315958/tdest_id/734384

Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over

Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over

By Janja Lalich and Karla McLaren
Published by Routledge, 2017 – Available on Amazon



“Escaping Utopia is a must read book for everyone concerned about the real nature of human nature. Authors Lalich and McLaren do a brilliant job in revealing the various psycho-social mechanisms by which cults attract, deceive and bind recruits into their ‘families,’ at great personal costs—and how to help them exit.” Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University “This is a unique and valuable book. The authors have taken a much-neglected subject: the fate of children growing up in cults who leave knowing little or nothing of the world outside their cult’s boundaries. The book is largely based on interviews with 65 of these former cult members from a wide variety of different types of cults. But the material is thematically unified by the authors’ profound theoretical understanding of cult dynamics gained through many decades of studying cults from both inside and out. This accessible and nuanced account of a controversial subject will be the standard reference on its subject for many years to come.” -- Benjamin Zablocki, Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, Rutgers University


Actor Glenn Close. Humorist Garrison Keillor. Musician Lisa Marie Presley. Actor
Leah Remini. Singer Toni Braxton. The late actor River Phoenix. Each of these
well-known people has more than fame in common; each was born or raised in a cult.

Many of us think of cults as bizarre groups that only strange people inhabit, but in truth, cults are not unusual at all—and the social pressures and controlling
structures that create cults exist (to some degree) in every human relationship
and every human group. Cult behavior is human behavior—and by studying
cults, we can learn remarkably useful things about the world and our place in it.

In Escaping Utopia, Janja Lalich and Karla McLaren (both cult survivors) explore
the life stories of 65 people who were born in or grew up in 39 different cults
spanning more than a dozen countries. This original research explores
fundamental questions about human nature, human development, group
dynamics, abuse and control, and triumphs of the human spirit in the face of
extended suffering.

The lessons we can learn from these cult survivors can inform and protect each
of us—so that cultic groups cannot gain influence over us or our loved ones.

Janja Lalich, Ph.D. is a researcher, author, and educator specializing in self-
sealing systems (cults, terrorist groups, extremist groups), with a focus on
indoctrination and methods of influence and control. She is Professor Emerita of
Sociology at California State University, Chico, and has studied the social
psychology of exploitative groups and relationships for over thirty years.

Website: http://cultresearch.org/

Karla McLaren, M.Ed. is an award-winning author and social science researcher
who grew up in a New Age healing cult. Her research focuses on emotions, empathy, autism and neurodiversity, social-emotional learning, within-group and
inter-group dynamics, agnotology, and influence techniques.

Beware those who think they can build utopia

David Aaronovitch
The Times
April 11, 2018

The Rajneeshees, now starring in a remarkable Netflix series, showed the dangers of being self-absorbed and self-righteous.

Jane, an elegant woman in her early seventies with a gentle Antipodean accent, is describing how she once tried to commit murder. It was back in 1985 when she and her two children were living on a commune in the United States. The group she was in had got it into their heads that their guru's doctor was planning to help the master commit suicide. The idea was that the plot should be pre-empted by the doctor being injected with poison. "Someone said 'Who will do it?', when somebody spoke and said, 'I will do it'." Pause. "That was me. That was my voice." And so, feeling "like Joan of Arc", she sought the doctor out in a crowd of revellers and stabbed him in the buttocks. He survived.

Back then Jane was Shanti Bhadra, a sannyasin, or follower of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a fiftysomething spiritual leader from India. More than 30 years later she was telling her story to the makers of the most remarkable documentary I've seen for some time, Wild Wild Country, which began to air on Netflix recently. It's an account of how thousands of the followers of the Bhagwan, a free-love, free-market guru, tried to establish a utopia in the state of Oregon, and ended up as accessories to attempted murder and bioterrorism.

The sannyasin were famous for wearing orange or red clothes and if you're over 45 you may have met some back in the day. My most illustrious columnist predecessor on this newspaper certainly did. In April 1980 the great Bernard Levin visited the Bhagwan's ashram in Poona (now Pune) in India.

It was like Sir Simon Rattle endorsing the Eurovision Song Contest. "They [the sannyasin] have shed their chains, and they demonstrated their freedom easily and unobtrusively," he wrote, eventually concluding, "I came away impressed, moved, fascinated, by my experience of this man (or God, or conduit, or reminder) and the people ('be ordinary and you will become extraordinary') around him."

The year after Levin's journey, the Bhagwan and his followers decamped for Oregon. Led by his secretary, a small, fiery woman called Ma Anand Sheela, they had bought the 60,000 acres plus of the Big Muddy Ranch, a livestock farm outside the tiny town of Antelope, whose population was then only 40. It was "the Promised Land", where the faithful would build a city of 10,000 people called Rajneeshpuram.

Taking advantage of state rules that allowed people to set up their own self-governing towns, hundreds of Orange builders, architects, engineers and would-be farmers arrived to build the new Shangri-La. The footage of their efforts is like the pictures of the building of the Soviet Union by Heroes of Socialist Labour.

With the Bhagwan being spiritual in his rooms, leadership came from Sheela — intelligent, charismatic, practical and driven. And with a populist's talent for identifying enemies and motivating friends.

But there was a problem. No one had consulted the locals. Cults were not popular; it was only a few years after the mass suicide at Jonestown. Bewildered at first, then scared, then angry, the Oregonians began to organise against the new city and to lobby state legislators to block its growth. So Sheela responded by buying much of Antelope. The Rajneeshees bought the café and the garage. Soon they had a majority on the town council. They renamed the town Rajneesh and changed Main Street to Bhagwan Street. They made love noisily at night. "My aunt," recalled one Antelopean, "was not pleased with that."

Now the sannyasin were in conflict with the administration of Wasco County, the area where Rajneeshpuram was located. Sheela doubled down. Guns were bought and worshippers trained to use them.

But unless the Orange people could win the vote to appoint new county commissioners, Sheela believed the new city was doomed. So she took action. First she had (and I am not joking) 6,000 homeless people, mostly men, bussed in from all over America, with an eye to getting them to vote in the next county elections. This supremely cynical act was depicted as a great kindness, but the newcomers (many of whom had significant mental problems) were given sedated beer to drink to keep them docile. And when the county refused to register these new voters, Sheela organised the eviction of many of these now useless men into surrounding towns and villages.

Through all this the sannyasin sang and danced and meditated and imagined their lives to be better than anyone else's. As they did when, in an apparent attempt to deter turnout, the leadership arranged for salmonella to be sprayed over food in restaurant buffets in the county, leaving more than 700 people sick. As they did when Sheela and Jane and others conspired to murder the hostile state attorney for Oregon, who luckily failed to turn up outside his office on the day he was supposed to die.

In the end the internal splits caused Sheela and her comrades to flee Rajneeshpuram by plane. At that point the Bhagwan came out of seclusion and denounced her. She had been Lady Macbeth and Livia rolled into one and had done all the bad things. Like communists in 1956 the sannyasin reacted with naive shock. One told cameras, "When you think that you know things, you feel safe, right? And I felt that I knew things. And now in this moment I know that I don't know them."

Are there some universal lessons here, in this declension from Levin's "extraordinary" people to the prison sentences that the Rajneeshpuram leaders ended up serving? One should be the dangers posed by those who are both self-absorbed and self-righteous, who imagine that they alone have the keys to the kingdom and that those who oppose them do so only out of moral weakness or failure. People who cannot see beyond their own goodness rarely manage genuine understanding of others.

And the other lesson may be that legal rights and moral rights are different. The Rajneeshees believed that the law gave them the right to start utopia in someone else's world. Any opposition, therefore, was illegitimate. But there is a big difference between what is legal and what is right.

Jane served some time in a German prison but was wanted in the United States. When her son was dying of a brain tumour in Australia she couldn't visit him for fear of extradition. She returned to Oregon in 2006 to face the US courts. Despite the fact that she had both conspired to murder and attempted murder, the judge sentenced her to time already served. "Sometimes," he said, "justice is stronger than mercy, but sometimes mercy overrules justice and we have such a case today". That judge had what the utopians didn't. Empathy.


www.thetimes.co.uk/article/beware-those-who-think-they-can-build-utopia-the-rajneeshees-wild-wild-country-netflix-pflbjhvdm

Archaeologists uncover Cambridgeshire's long lost wife-swapping colony

The project was inspired by socialist visions and abolished concepts like money - but it ran out of one key resource
ANNA SAVVA

Cambridge News
September 17, 2017

A team of Cambridge archaeologists who unearthed the site of Cambridgeshire's long-lost Victorian utopia project have released a video on their findings.

The excavations were undertaken in Manea by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, under the direction of Dr Marcus Brittain, in partnership with the Octavia Hill Birthplace House.

It was in 1838 that farmer, one-time sailor and lay Methodist minister William Hodson bought a plot of land in Manea, a village on the edge of Littleport.

Inspired by socialist visions, he aimed to establish a cooperative community where everyone would be 'equal'.

But despite abolishing all money and working the land together, this Utopian vision became marred by personality clashes and objections to the practice of 'free love'.

The Manea Fen project then came crashing down just two and a half years later when a key investor from Wisbech went bust in 1841.

Speaking in a podcast as part of the Ouse Washes Project, local historian Mike Petty described how the project, which was once home to 150 people, failed.

He said: "They abolished money but they they also abolished matrimony and the married couples who had to subscribed to a new vision there suddenly decided they had something they didn't want to share.

"They tended to leave and that left the colony with no ladies.

"To find ladies they had to advertise in Manchester newspapers and the people who left spread gossip about the goings on in the colony."

There was also moral opposition from the Christian advocate at Cambridge University lead by Rev Pearson, who saw the project as dangerous.

William Hodson stayed till 1846 before heading off to America, where he became a founding member of a colony in Wisconsin called Jane's Ville.
The site

Despite its eventual failure, the project was one of the more successful 19th century social experiments, with its achievements documented in The Working Bee , a weekly newspaper printed on-site.

Built around a central square, the village included terraces of cottages, a public dining hall, communal kitchen, a school and a grand tower from which much of the fen could be observed over tea.

All of this was built by the colonists themselves - most of them handpicked as skilled labourers - from locally-sourced materials.

Since the excavation work began last year the team has been successful in locating the wood and brick foundations of some of the original buildings, along with pits containing the refuse discarded by their inhabitants.

Site director for the  Archaeology project, Dr Brittan said: “These indicate that the buildings were fairly sizeable, but relatively flimsy in construction and maybe not equipped for sustaining 1,000 years’ of community as was envisaged in their design.

“Their refuse also tells us that personal adornment with decorative dress items was commonplace, in spite of concerns that the promotion of individuality led to greed and disharmony in the industrial world.”

The 2016 evacuations were funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund as part of the Ouse Washes Landscape Partnership.

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/history/wife-swapping-manea-project-utopian-13631077