10 Failed Utopias

Utopias were particularly popular in the United States during the early to mid-19th century—but humanity’s desire for such societies has been a cultural mainstay for much longer. Utopian societies, which are often headed by charismatic, messiah-like figures, frequently devolve into what they once proclaimed to detest. They’re typically envisioned as Eden-like refuges from the stranglehold of corruption and capitalism. But the lofty goals of spiritual enlightenment and total communion with nature quickly crumble when confronted with the cold realities of everyday life. Markedly easier to imagine than to maintain, these failed experiments serve as a near perfect simulacrum for humanity’s aspiration and limitation. 

1. Fruitlands
2. Brook Farm 
3. Drop City 
4. Helicon Home Colony
5. Jonestown 
6. Oneida Community 
7. Kommune 1 
8. Zendik Farm
9. Colonia Dignidad
10. New Australia

Fruitlands

Founded by transcendentalist Charles Lash and philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott), Fruitlands was a short-lived agrarian commune located in Harvard, Massachusetts. It was established in 1843 as a radically vegan, utopian collective; residents of Fruitlands were united under a nebulous, transcendentalist philosophy and sought a return to nature in response to the capitalist voracity of the Industrial Revolution. The 14 residents of Fruitlands aspired to an almost ascetic lifestyle in communion with the natural world. But despite the group’s harmonic ambitions, Fruitlands quickly devolved into interminable infighting, squalid living conditions, and rapidly diminishing food supplies.

The residents—while teeming with philosophical and intellectual prestige—were decidedly lacking in agricultural acumen. The Alcott family’s brief stint in Fruitlands would serve as the inspiration for daughter Louisa May’s satirical short story Transcendental Wild Oats, which lampooned the experiment and its goals. After just seven months of miserable living, Fruitlands resources were exhausted, and by January 1844, the residents of the commune had vacated. Alcott relocated his family to Concord, Massachusetts; there, they took up residence in The Wayside, a historic home where many of the events inspiring Louisa’s coming-of-age novel Little Women transpired. 

Brook Farm 

Brook Farm was created by George and Sophia Ripley in 1841 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts—just miles from downtown Boston—as a joint-stock company (a business organization wherein shareholders can buy and sell stocks). It was founded on the egalitarian principles of shared work and shared profits; the Ripley’s conceived Brook Farm as an experimental communal living model to potentially be applied to society at large. The commune kept itself afloat through the operation of a school overseen by Sophia Ripley and through its comparatively insignificant farming activity. 

Brook Farm moved to a socialist community model just a few years after its inception to bolster its floundering economy. Now united under socialist principles as described by French philosopher Charles Fourier, the residents then began construction on what became known as the Phalanstery.  The Phalanstery—a portmanteau of the words phalanx (a military formation) and monastery (a domestic dwelling for monks or nuns)—was a convoluted organization of buildings Fourier envisioned would bring rural and urban living together in one structure. Though construction initially appeared to be going well, the structure was destroyed by a fire in 1844, financially devastating Brook Farm and beginning its dissolution. 

Residents began to breakaway from the commune in the following years, and by 1847, Brook Farm had ceased operations. The property was later purchased by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation who designated it a National Historic Landmark in 1965. 

Drop City 

Composed of a series of geometric, dome-shaped abodes nestled near the southern border of Colorado and New Mexico, Drop City was a counterculture hippie commune founded in 1965 by artists who went by the names Curly Benson, Larry Lard, Drop Lady, and Clard Svenson. It was envisioned as an extension of an art project the group began working on while at the University of Kansas; Drop City was intended to be a live-in piece of “Drop Art,” a style of guerilla art developed by Gene Bernosky and Clark Richert. 

Drop City gained some notoriety in the 1960s underground scene, leading hundreds to began flocking there to assist in constructing the famed domes, which were made from salvaged automobile parts and scrap metal. But as it began to attract more media attention, philosophical infighting within the community led to the exit of some of its founding members. Drop City was wholly abandoned by 1979. It was sold to a nearby cattle rancher before the last of its trademark domes was torn down in the late ‘90s. 

Helicon Home Colony

Helicon Home Colony was an experimental community intended to be a wholly self-sufficient commune with roughly 100 homes across hundreds of acres of land. The Jungle author Upton Sinclair founded it in an Englewood, New Jersey, school building in October 1906 and modeled the colony on ideas espoused by eugenicist and self-described “humanist” Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow Wallpaper. Despite purporting an enlightened worldview, Helicon Home Colony was an inherently racist organization that explicitly barred Black, Jewish, and non-white applicants from joining. 

The colony lasted less than half a year—it disbanded after a fire destroyed its ad-hoc headquarters and killed one of the residents. Sinclair was crushed, later recalling of his time at Helicon Home Colony, “I have lived in the future and all things about me seem drab and sordid in comparison.”

Jonestown 

Jonestown, officially called the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project, was a secluded commune in Guyana's rainforest that was headed by deluded preacher Jim Jones. Jones began building the commune after his cult, the Peoples Temple, started receiving increasingly negative press coverage surrounding the leader’s domineering control over and abuse of his followers. He claimed to have received visions of an impending nuclear apocalypse and race war and was able to convince some of his followers to move from the United States to Jonestown, where they were united under what he referred to as “Apostolic Socialism.”  

After operating for nearly four years, Jonestown’s contentious stint in Guyana came to a close in 1978 following a mass murder-suicide orchestrated by Jones. California Congressman Leo Ryan—alongside a delegation of federal officials, reporters, and relatives of Jonestown members—decided to visit the commune to investigate the claims of mistreatment that were emerging from the settlement. After visiting Jonestown and departing the commune with several defectors, Ryan and his party arrived at an airstrip in Port Kaituma, where they were attacked by a group of gunmen sent by Jones. Five people, including Ryan, were killed.

While the attack in Port Kaituma unfolded, Jones ordered a large metal tub filled with poisoned Flavor Aid (often misidentified as Kool-Aid, giving rise to the drinking the Kool-Aid malapropism) be prepared. Jones gathering the remaining residents at the commune’s central pavilion and ordered his followers to ingest the poisoned Flavor Aid. More than 900 people—including infants and children—died. Jones was discovered in the central pavilion, dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. 

Oneida Community 

The Oneida Community was a radical Christian commune founded on the Perfectionist belief followers could achieve a perfect union of pure love with God. It was established outside of Oneida, New York, in 1848 and led by preacher and philosopher John Humphrey Noyes. Residents of the Oneida Community were encouraged to engage in “free love” (a term Noyes is credited with coining) and what they called “complex marriage,” which functionally equated to polyamory. Though the Oneida Community only ever reached a maximum population of a few hundred, the commune functioned almost like a theocratic corporation, maintaining a convoluted bureaucratic structure with dozens of committees and councils. 

The Oneida Community began to splinter from ceaseless infighting that was largely sparked by Noyes’s attempt to hand leadership over to his agnostic, comparatively uncharismatic son Theodore. Shortly after his attempt to cede chief authority over the Community to his son, Noyes found himself under increased legal scrutiny and was eventually tipped off about an impending statutory rape charge, causing him to flee to Canada. He wrote to his followers imploring them to abandon their complex marriage and “free love” lifestyle after arriving in Niagara Falls. 

The Oneida Community was converted to a joint-stock company in 1880, ending the commune’s 30-year run. The remnants of the Oneida Community exist today as Oneida Limited, a tableware manufacturer owned by the Lenox Corporation—it’s now one of the largest sellers of stainless steel and silver plated cutlery. 

Kommune 1 

Beginning in German author Hans Magnus Enzenberger’s Berlin apartment, Kommune 1 was a socialism-inspired commune that came into fruition during the West German student movement, a series of left-wing political protests that took place in the late 1960s. Kommune 1 was designed to shatter the traditional family structure—it deemed the nuclear family the primary progenitor of fascism—in an effort to usher in a new era of socialist splendor. Though never housing more than about a dozen residents, Kommune 1 garnered quite a bit of public notoriety from its frequently bizarre staged protest events; it was lauded and detested with equal intensity from both sides of the political spectrum.

Kommune 1 took on a “free love” philosophy near the end of the 1960s and developed an international reputation as a sort of mecca for hedonists. It even drew the attention of celebrities like Jimi Hendrix. The commune’s increasing focus on growing its member’s public profiles led to splintering within the group; the entire group eventually dispersed by late 1969 after a biker gang ransacked their headquarters. 

Zendik Farm

The Zendik Farm Arts Cooperative—more commonly known as Zendik Farm—was an intentional community designed for artists seeking a creatively enriching, ecologically responsible lifestyle. It was founded by Wulf Zendik (born Lawrence E. Wulfing), a bohemian artist raised in Los Angeles, who, alongside his wife Arol Wulfing (born Carol Merson Weinberg), sought to establish a community free from the restrictive social conventions of the time. 

Zendik Farm began at a modest ranch owned by Wulf’s parents outside Perris, California, then later moved to Miami, Florida, where the group would convert to a non-profit structure under The Zendik Society - Church of Life Essence, Inc. After spending just a few years in Florida, the commune relocated to Bonsall, California, where they took up residence in a homestead, again owned by Wulf’s parents. The group had whittled down to just five residents; they began selling self-published magazines touting their radical environmentalist philosophies to generate income. 

After commercial pesticides in the area made living in Bonsall untenable, the group decamped to Topanga before finally settling in Boulevard, California, in 1986. With greater access to the San Diego and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, Zendik Farm’s influence ballooned, and by the late 1980s the group had grown to dozens of members. They continued to largely generate income through their publishing activity. Zendik Farm later relocated back to Florida and then to North Carolina where Wulf, the group’s de facto leader, died at the age of 79. 

After making one final move to Marlinton, West Virginia, the residents at the commune slowly dwindled from 60 to just a handful by the time Arol Wulfing passed away in 2012 at the age of 72. The group finally disbanded after his death. 

Colonia Dignidad

After fleeing West Germany to evade child molestation charges in 1961, Christian minister Paul Schӓfer escaped to southern Chile alongside a group of fellow Germans to found Colonia Dignidad (also known as Dignity Colony). It was a secretive, inhospitable commune modeled after the teachings of televangelist William Branham—and under Schӓfer’s leadership, allegations of rampant abuse began forming cracks in the commune’s immaculate public-facing veneer. Schӓfer had orchestrated a backdoor deal with Chile’s fascist ruling government that provided him with political asylum and tax exemption in exchange for assisting the Chilean government with “intelligence gathering.”

Schӓfer—in collaboration with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet—oversaw the torture and murder of hundreds of political dissidents housed at Colonia Dignidad as prisoners. Despite Pinochet’s fascist regime falling in 1990, Colonia Dignidad was able to remain largely autonomous, leveraging their remaining political connections and cache of weapons defenses to deter outsiders from attempting to interfere with operations.     

After dozens of child sexual abuse charges were brought against him by the newly established democratic Chilean government, Schӓfer fled to Argentina, where he would remain in hiding for almost eight years before being extradited back to Chile. In 2006, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his crimes; he served just a few years of his sentence before dying in April 2010. Despite the commune’s sordid history, it was controversially converted to a tourist attraction in the 1990s under the name Villa Baviera. 

New Australia

New Australia was a utopian, socialist commune established in south central Paraguay in 1893 by Australian labour activist William Lane. Despite espousing utopian socialist ideals, Lane was a dauntless racist, confining residency in New Australia exclusively to white people and advocating for racial segregation more broadly. 

He was able to convince a ragtag group of more than 200 Australians to join him in Paraguay through promises of good land and shared communist ideals. But after arriving there, the residents of New Australia were faced with all sorts of challenges, from insect borne diseases to difficult jungle terrain. The New Australians had arrived wildly underprepared for the task at hand. 

As the settlement’s burdensome topography continued to dissolve morale within the group, the community was further fractured under Lane’s stringent ban of alcohol and prohibition of New Australian men from interacting with the local women. More and more residents of New Australia either returned home to Australia proper or defected to other communes with less repressive rules. Shortly after Lane abandoned the commune to resume his journalism career in New Zealand, Paraguay dissolved the group’s cooperative status and New Australia’s brief existence came to a close in 1897. 

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