The Ministers’ War: John W. Mears, the Oneida Community, and the
Crusade for Public Morality. By
Michael Doyle. Syracuse University Press. 2018.
This review originally appeared n NEPCA Journal. I re-post it because there are parallels to how today's self-appointed moralists react to those whose lifestyles are outside the mainstream.
Antebellum activism is often refracted through an
abolitionist lens, though few Northern evangelicals compartmentalized reform. Protestant
ministers spearheading change could be found among any of a number of reform
groups. In this regard, the
subject of Michael Doyle’s fascinating study, the Rev. John W. Mears
(1825-1881), was typical of men from the rising Northern middle class whose
passions were inflamed by the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening,
which reached their height in the 1830s. There wasn’t much that Mears didn’t
see as a sin in need of extirpation: prostitution, birth control literature,
Mormonism, water pollution, Roman Catholicism, Valentine’s Day cards, obscenity….
The last of these, obscenity, really distressed Mears who was, as Doyle, a
Washington, DC-based reporter, puts it, a “virtuous man (44).”
Battles over obscenity often stumble over its definition and
parameters. As Doyle suggests, this was Mears’ problem. In the crucial decades
before the Civil War, virtue was generally synonymous with the values of the
middle class, but it took Mears some time to direct his prodigious energies at
the targets that consumed him: John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) and the Oneida
Community. On the surface, the Oneida Community was what we’d today call a
“soft target.” It was, after all, rooted in ideals located far from the banks of
the mainstream, the least controversial of which was shared property and living
arrangements rooted in spiritual communism. Members also practiced a system of
“complex marriage” in which all men and women could (in theory) have carnal
relations with each other. Moreover, Noyes equated unwanted pregnancy as
enslavement of women, hence the keystone practice of “male continence.” More
shocking still, young men learned this discipline through intercourse with
postmenopausal women. Noyes himself was a bail jumper who escaped Putney,
Vermont, and a possible jail term for adultery back in 1847. So why did it take
Mears and the other ministers he recruited until 1881 to force the dissolution
of the Oneida Community?
One of the many merits of Doyle’s book is that he captures
aspects of the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist in just 172 briskly written pages.
Mears shared commonality with others emboldened by the Second Great Awakening,
but as Paul Johnson and others have demonstrated, conversion in Western New
York State’s “burned-over district” was weighted heavily toward the middle
class. Most locals were farmers
and artisans. Although they disapproved of Oneida Community practices, most
were also intrigued (possibly titillated) by them, found the group to be good
neighbors, and were willing to live and let live. This adds an under-examined
class dimension to the crusade against Oneida.
It is important to note that neither Mears nor Noyes should
be viewed through modern eyes. The Presbyterian Mears was meddlesome, but he
was not akin to contemporary moralists. Northern evangelists were not
fundamentalists—the concept barely existed then. Mears studied theology at Yale,
revered Immanuel Kant, and was an exacting professor of moral philosophy at Hamilton
College. Nor was Noyes a proto-hippie free lover; the Dartmouth/Andover
Seminary-educated Noyes based community sexual practices in conceptions of
primitive Christianity and a belief in moral perfectionism, the latter a key
element of Second Great Awakening thought. In one of the books many concise
summaries, Doyle details ways in which Mears and Noyes were quite similar in
many respects. The sexual practices gap, though, was simply too wide for the
stern Mears to bridge.
Mears prevailed—sort of; Oneida disbanded in 1881, but Mears
expired that same year. One is tempted to draw parallels between the minister’s
campaign against Oneida and today’s culture wars but, again, Doyle’s objective
is to shed light on the nineteenth century, not our own time. Oneida was an
endlessly intoxicating experiment about which much has been written. The
dissolution narrative generally ends with the incorporation of the community’s
chief source of income, its flatware manufactory. Doyle deftly illumines the lesser-known
details of the organized opposition that forced the community’s hand. Metaphorically,
Noyes represents the utopian impulse and Mears what Robert Wiebe famously
dubbed “the search for order.” Doyle's small gem of a book should prove
invaluable in facilitating discussions of ante- and postbellum America.
Undergraduates will appreciate its clarity and brevity; general readers will
find it fascinating.
Robert E. Weir
University of
Massachusetts
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