A History of the American People

of America's greatest newspapers, the Christian Science Monitor. It quickly spread into 3,200
branches in forty-eight countries. Here again was overwhelming evidence of the new American
phenomenon-the way in which religious belief, often of a strange and (some would say)
implausible character, produced hugely creative movements with a strong cultural and
educational content. Even the most bizarre of these sects founded schools, training colleges for
teachers and evangelists, and even universities. Some of America's greatest institutions of higher
education have their origins in the Second Great Awakening. It was, for instance, the leading
theologian of the Awakening, Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875), who created Oberlin
College in Ohio. The Awakening gave an impulse to Unitarianism, which had come to America
in the 1770s and opened King's College Chapel in Boston. The American Unitarian Association
was formed in 1825 and quickly radiated all over America. With its rationalist and undogmatic
approach to theology and its low-key ritual it particularly attracted intellectuals and scientists,
and those of its members with a romantic and utopian disposition tended to set up rustic
communities devoted to high thinking and simple living. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), who
moved into the sect from Calvinism, wrote to the British sage Thomas Carlyle in 1840: We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his pocket.' Emerson had a finger in a pie of one such, Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, founded by a Boston Unitarian minister, George Ripley. It included on its agricultural committee the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64)-of whom more later-and had a printing press, a kiln for artistic pottery, and a workshop for making furniture. Needless to say it ended in bankruptcy and was cuttingly dismissed by Carlyle, who epitomized Ripley asa
Socinian minister who left the pulpit to reform the world by growing onions.'
One writes needless to say' but in fact many of the religious-utopian communities, especially the German ones, flourished mightily as commercial or farming enterprises and survive today as models of moral probity, communal tidiness, and capitalist decorum. But others commercialized themselves out of religion altogether. A group of German Pietists under George Rapp (1757- 1847) settled in a community at Harmony, Pennsylvania, in 1804, right at the beginning of the Second Awakening. They practiced auricular confession, among other things, and proved highly successful farmers and traders. But as they strictly opposed marriage and procreation, they eventually ceased to exist. At the other end of the sexual spectrum was Oneida Community in western New York, founded by John Humphrey Noyes (1811-86). This originally began as a socialist community, practicing free love, or what was known ascomplex marriage'-procreation,
as distinct from other sexual transactions,' was decided communally-and the children were brought up as in a kibbutz. The community made itself rich by manufacturing steel traps but eventually lost its faith and became a prosperous corporation. It is a curious fact that some of these religious sects had very ancient origins but it was only in the free air and vast spaces of America that they blossomed. Thus a medieval sect which in the 14th century developed a Shaking Dance as a form of its ritual (probably derived, via the Crusades, from a Moslem revivalist group known vulgarly as the Whirling Dervishes), continued to shake as Protestant Huguenots in 16th-century France, were expelled by Louis XIV, came to England, mated with a Quaker sect, and became the Shaking Quakers, and were finally brought to America byMother' Anne Lee (1736-84), the visionary daughter of a Manchester blacksmith.
These Shakers took advantage of the Second Awakening to develop a number of highly
successful utopian communities, distinguished by separation of the sexes, who lived in distinct
dormitories, and amazing Spiritualist seances, leading to apparitions, levitation, and spectral
voices. They had a frenzied group dance, distantly derived from the Huguenot camisard. It was