John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[522] of knowledge should be opened to every one who desired to enter. That could only be accomplished by the reform of society; and this reform of society these people, after long study and much discussion, determined it was their duty to realize. And that was what inspired the socialistic movement which began about 1835 or 1838. It was not, as you will observe, akin in the least to the theory of which Karl Marx is perhaps the most celebrated advocate, the government socialism, in which the government owns all land and machinery, all means of manufacture, all the shops of industry, and the people are its employees and subjects. On the contrary, the socialism of that day contemplated merely a system of associated living, of combined households, with joint stock ownership of the joint property; every stockholder to get his share in the profits, which he had helped to earn, and the share earned by the capital he had invested. The idea of government monopoly in ownership was most repugnant to the theorists we are speaking of. Individuality and liberty were their cherished objects, and all forms of communism they zealously repudiated. Nor did the socialism we are considering start from the uneducated or the poor. Its adherents were all people who had gathered in the fruit of the highest education, the fullest knowledge, the highest refinement that was known to American society in those times. They were scholars, thinkers, clergymen, philosophers, men and women of eminence in literature and society; and when some of them began to discuss the problem of revolutionizing social life, of placing it upon a democratic platform, and of giving each man an equal chance with every other man, their movement naturally drew a great deal of attention. It was joked about in the newspapers. The newspapers were great in joking then, as they have been since. They laughed at it and they prophesied that as every such undertaking of which they had a record had failed before, this would also fail and go out as a passing cloud, as a fancy that had no substantial reality behind it.

The idea of founding a society of associated families was strengthened considerably by the experience of the Shakers,