Bizarre Attempts To Create The Perfect Society

Right, so you're setting out to build your utopian community. Who do you bring with you? A mix of medical professionals, some farmers, some builders and construction workers, maybe? Or a bunch of thieves, pickpockets, and prostitutes? If you think the latter sounds like a great idea, then congratulations, you think like Denys Rolle.

Rolle was an 18th century English landowner, and he had the brilliant idea to build a utopian society in Florida. Since he was feeling particularly generous, he decided he was going to choose his original colonists from people who were rotting away in London jails. Those were, sadly, less than cream-of-the-crop type people, but one minor detail shouldn't stand in the way of a stellar plan.

Rolle started with 49 men and women and shipped them off to Florida and the St. Johns River, where they found nothing but mosquitoes waiting for them. Not only were there no homes, but Rolle insisted that before they built their own homes, they needed to dig up some palmetto roots for him. They said no, so Rolle took away their food. They left, as would we if some jerk took away our food.

The unwilling settlers fled to a nearby town to lodge a formal complaint and seriously, who can blame them? Arbitrators came to an agreement where the settlers would return if Rolle would stop being such a mean-spirited jerk, but once you set a tone like that, it's really, really hard to go back. Not everyone wanted to stay, and Rolle had to keep bringing over more people to replace the ones that chose to try their luck with the alligators, rather than him. Rolle eventually made the mistake of falling in love with one of his settlers, who (unsurprisingly) left him, probably after he took away her food.

The colony was almost non-existent by the 1770s, and Rolle had brief success restocking his plantation with slaves acquired the old-fashioned way, but it wasn't long after that Florida became Spanish territory and Rolle was given seven months to get out of Dodge. No one was heartbroken except for Rolle, who demanded restitution from England and got enough out of the deal that he could retire. The only people who made out in this story are Rolle and, presumably, the hungry alligators.

Pullman, Illinois was named for founder George Pullman. He built his community just outside of Chicago in the 1880s, intending it to provide the employees of his Pullman Palace Car Company with everything they could possibly need in one convenient place. That was so they never had to leave ... ever, ever again.

See where we're going? Pullman marketed his community as a feat of engineering, science, and art. It was the best of the best, and only for his employees. He insisted on the best for those that bought his company's train cars, after all, so why would he not want the same for his employees? There was, of course, a catch. Pullman believed that his workers were essentially uneducated heathens, who needed to be taught to enjoy the finer things in life and to appreciate everything capitalism had to offer. (Mostly, what it offered him.) That meant the community was laid out in such a way that the better areas were reserved for the higher-ups, and the unwashed masses were restricted to another area. Oh, if you were black? You couldn't live there at all.

You also needed to pay the insanely high prices charged by Pullman's store, pay another fee if you wanted to use the library, and attend the town's single church, no matter what your faith. Given that the workers were a diverse group of European immigrants, that didn't go over well. Did we mention there was no alcohol allowed? And the spies, too, that Pullman employed to make sure everyone was doing exactly what they were told and nothing more. This no longer sounds like a party we'd like to attend.

When the economy crashed in 1893, the whole house of cards came crashing down. No one was allowed to own their own home in Pullman, and even though he was forced to cut employee pay, he didn't cut the prices they were paying him for literally everything. Rioting spelled the end for Pullman in short order.

Fans of a certain type of literature will be familiar with Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women. She also spent six months of her childhood as a part of one of the most poorly thought-out utopian communities on the planet. She was 10 years old when her father, Bronson Alcott, took the family on the adventure of a lifetime. They set up Fruitlands as a transcendentalist community just outside of Concord, Massachusetts, starting their endeavor in June 1843. By January '44, they had moved right back out again.

On paper, it sounded like a noble idea. Fruitlands championed principles like harmony with nature, doing no harm to any other living thing, abolitionism, and sort of a general goodness. There were drawbacks, though, that started with that whole "no harm to anything" bit. They were so hardcore, their diet was restricted to things that didn't give up their "life force," like fruit trees that could keep producing. Unfortunately, the property they picked didn't have many fruit trees at all, and that seems like a pretty big oversight.

They also weren't allowed to use candles (because of the animal fat), which meant working and reading hours were severely limited as summer turned to winter. Things life coffee, tea, butter, rice, milk, and eggs were also off-limits, and it turned out that planting things created a bit of a moral dilemma for Alcott. That required disturbing the worms, after all, and clearly you can't have that.

Only 11 people joined the community, including one man who couldn't cope with the idea of physical work, and another who couldn't speak without swearing because he believed it elevated his pure spirit. Another disapproved of clothes. We can't imagine why this one failed.

The 300-odd members of the Oneida Community took communal living to a whole new level, and shared a 93,000-square-foot house they called "Mansion House." Given some of their beliefs, this was probably a convenient arrangement that made sure no one's Walk of Shame was too long.

The basis of communal beliefs was that the Second Coming had already happened, and now it was humanity's turn to prove how good they were, and bring about Heaven on Earth. They did it by subscribing to a lifestyle that included the absolute adherence to the teachings of leader John Humphrey Noyes (who had already been deemed perfect by The Man Upstairs).

A huge part of what they thought God thoroughly approved of was variety, and that extended to marriage, too. The group practiced something called communal marriage, where every man and woman was connected in one big divine marriage. That not only meant two or three different partners a week, but that older community members often initiated younger ones into that particular way of life. What if you found "The One" and wanted to just stay with that person? You were considered idolatrous.

It's no surprise that this contributed in large part to the downfall of the community, but pieces of it are still around. Hard work was an essential part of the community, and among the businesses they founded was a silverware manufacturing company that's still the world's largest, even today.

Everyone knows how the People's Temple ended: with a mass suicide at Jonestown. But long before that, Jim Jones had planted the roots of his perfect religious society in Indianapolis, Indiana. He moved there after marrying, stumbling on the bizarre idea of selling imported monkeys, to raise money to support his new community of believers. At the time, it wasn't the fire-and-brimstone preaching he'd be most famous for. That came later.

His followers settled into the People's Temple Full Gospel Church, attending services, faith healings, and performances on a theatrical level. Because this story can't get too weird, they eventually needed to expand, and settled into an old synagogue, leased to them by one of the area's most vocal opponents of fringe groups and generally terrifying cults.

Originally, the community was built on ideas we can all get behind, like community service, racial equality, and helping the elderly and the disabled. He was even appointed as head of the Human Rights Commission in Indianapolis because, why not? But things started getting a little squirrely when Jones insisted that everyone call him "Dad" and spend holidays at his church. That's when he started preaching that he had seen a vision of nuclear war, and they all needed to get the heck out of the area. That's why they headed south of the border and farther south still, and we all know what happened next.