The Noyes Plays

The True History
of John Humphrey Noyes
and the Oneida Community
- Parts 1 & 2

John Humphrey Noyes founded “the most revolutionary of all communal experiments in the nineteenth century” - and arguably in American history -  the Oneida Community. As the self-ordained “Father” of his utopian followers for thirty years, Noyes collectivized labor in the Community’s industries and abolished private property on the grounds of  its Mansion House at Oneida, New York. But the defrocked preacher of Christian “Perfectionism” went still further:  not only property, but spouses, were to be held in common in the Noyesian vision of heaven on earth.
In the Community’s newspapers, including THE AMERICAN SOCIALIST and THE  CIRCULAR, Noyes proclaimed that the Oneida system of “Complex Marriage” had eradicated the subjugation of women, the tyranny of monogamous marriage, and the burden of unwanted children. Finally, Noyes came to believe that his system made possible the betterment of  “human stock” through a program of selective mating. Race Culture or, as Noyes termed it, Stirpiculture,  would become the utopian Community’s ultimate experiment: the application of scientific breeding to human beings.

The dialogue attributed to the personages in The Noyes Plays  is taken more or less directly from the extensive record left by members of the Community, ever conscious of posterity and the historical significance of their experiment. This, then, can be said to be a true story, told in the words of the people who made it.   (From the PREFACE).

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