reading & libraries ii || william maclure and the new harmony working men's institute

William Maclure and the New Harmony Working Men's InstituteAuthor(s): Jeffrey DouglasSource: Libraries & Culture, Vol. 26, No. 2, Reading & Libraries II (Spring, 1991), pp. 402-414Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25542345 .

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William Maclure and the New Harmony Working Men's Institute

Jeffrey Douglas

As a means of furthering the interests of the American working class,

geologist and social reformer William Maclure planned to establish a network

of libraries throughout the United States. A social library founded in New

Harmony, Indiana, in 1838 was to serve as a model for other communities to

follow. Initially, the library's working-class orientation greatly affected its

policies and its collection. Another significant factor was the failed Utopian ex

periment at New Harmony in the 1820s, remnants of which remained.

Lukewarm response to the library by the laborers of the community led to

lengthy debate about limited access to the library and called into question the

viability of this approach.

When the Working Men's Institute in New Harmony, Indiana, was

founded in 1838 at the site of one of the most important American ex

periments in communal living, it defined for itself a political agenda deeply rooted in the radical social theories of its benefactor, William Maclure. The

Working Men's Institute is significant today not only as a highly structured

social library that consciously pursued a

populist program in the age of

Jackson, but also as one whose early struggles to define its purposes are

preserved in great detail in a wealth of documents.

William Maclure was born in Ayr, Scotland, in 1763. Beginning in

1783, he traveled extensively throughout Europe and to the United States as a representative for a London mercantile firm. He settled in Philadelphia

in the 1780s and became an American citizen in 1800, at about the same

time that he retired from his business career. The American Philosophical

Society?to which Maclure was elected a Fellow in 1791?published two

editions of Maclure's major scientific work, the ground-breaking Observa

tions on the Geology of the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1809 and

Jeffrey Douglas is associate librarian for public and technical services, Knox College,

Galesburg, Illinois.

Libraries and Culture, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring 1991 ?1991 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713



403

1817). He was also instrumental in the 1812 founding of the Academy of

Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and its early financial survival.

Maclure pursued his pioneering geological surveys at least partially as a

result of his staunch advocacy of what was then widely known as "useful

knowledge." His interests in science and in social reform are inseparable.

The intimate link he saw between the two is revealed in the preface to Obser

vations on the Geology of the United States of America: "Why mankind should

have so long neglected to acquire knowledge so useful to the progress of

civilization?why substances . . . without whose aid they could not exer

cise any one art or profession, should be the last to occupy their attentions"

could be explained only by "an analysis of the nature and origin of the

power of the few over the many."1 Knowledge was, he believed, a key

variable in an involved social and political equation. Maclure's social theories are a bizarre and anachronistic hybrid of

Enlightenment rationalism and an unmistakably Marxist analysis of

politics and economics. For though the natural sciences and their methods

are the key organizing principles behind them, an equally important princi

ple is Maclure's division of the world into two classes of people: the produc tive?"those who labour with their hands, and produce"?and the non

productive?"those who, from the accumulation of industry, hereditary

power, or pillage, have acquired a sufficiency to live without labour."2 He

firmly believed that a set of natural laws governing human behavior and

human institutions?a sort of socioeconomic equivalent of Newton's laws of

motion?would inevitably be discovered if those in whose interest these laws functioned (the productive working class) were allowed to experiment

with existing social institutions free of the meddlesome influence of the

politically powerful and self-interested few.

Only the United States was close to being the kind of social laboratory necessary for the discovery of these social laws. Maclure's description of the

"facts" or "axioms" that he thought had resulted so far from the

American experiment is the most concise summary of his own social

theory:

That the natural consequences of all human actions, when left free

to find their level, is the division of property, more or less into equal parts.

The division of property insures an equal division of knowledge. Division of property and knowledge into nearly equal parts, pro

duces the like division of power. And, that the equalization of these three ingredients, constitutes

the freedom and happiness of mankind.3

Maclure's definition of knowledge limited it to those sensible phenomena



404 L&CI William Maclure

of practical value. Like people, knowledge could be divided into two types:

productive and nonproductive. He complained that "the greatest part of

what is taught in all our old schools, colleges or universities, tends to the or

namental killing of time."4 Many nineteenth-century reformers promoted

their own curricular checklists in the manner of today's conservative social

critics. Topics Maclure thought worthy of instruction were drawing,

chemistry, natural history ("a knowledge of all the useful properties of

animate and inanimate bodies that nature has placed round us"), mineral

ogy, geology, botany, zoology, arithmetic and mathematics, mechanics,

natural philosophy (physics), geography, and astronomy.5 Notably absent are all works of imaginative literature. He denounced fiction in the

strongest of terms: "By confusing the evidence of our senses, with the

creatures of our imagination and stretching the faculties of the mind

beyond their natural limits, we give wrong direction to thought, and pro mote discussions and disputes, that never have, and never can

produce any

thing useful."6

Maclure found a direction for his reformist tendencies when he met

Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi in 1805. Pestalozzi had become known

for his application of rudimentary principles of educational psychology in

schools designed to improve the conditions of the poor. In an attempt to

nurture this worthy educational development in the most hospitable

political climate possible, Maclure sponsored the immigration to Phila

delphia of three Pestalozzian teachers, Joseph Neef, Marie Duclos Freta

geot, and Phiquephal d'Arusmont.7 He supported them for many years as

they struggled to establish Pestalozzi's techniques in American schools.

Maclure first attempted to combine Pestalozzi's pedagogical methods with

his own political theories at a Spanish agricultural school in the early 1820s.

He abandoned this plan when the liberal Spanish regime he had supported was overthrown and the estate he had bought for the school was taken from

him.

Had his Spanish project not been aborted, Maclure might never have

returned to America?at least not in time to participate in Robert Owen's

communitarian experiment here. Like Maclure, Owen was a wealthy

businessman with an ambitious and liberal social agenda. Enriched by his

interests in cotton mills in the north of England, Owen had turned one of

his mill towns, New Lanark, into a model industrial community. After

leaving Spain, Maclure visited Owen's schools there and came away with a

very favorable impression.8

Owen had achieved great renown as a reformer throughout Great Britain

by 1824, when he decided to demonstrate the universal applicability of

his reforms at New Lanark by putting them into practice in an American

setting. The site Owen chose was Harmony, a

village on the Wabash River

in Posey County, Indiana. Harmony had been settled by a German



405

religious sect, the Harmony Society (also known as Rappites), in 1814. The

Rappites had been extremely successful at Harmony, but wanted to return

to Pennsylvania, their original American home. Owen bought the entire

town from them in 1825 and renamed it New Harmony. The Rappites'

harmony had been between God and man. Owen's socialist "new har

mony' ' would be among people working selflessly for the common good so

that none would know either privation or corrupting wealth.

Owen created a genuine sensation in America when he arrived to begin his Utopian experiment. Intellectuals as well as reformers of all stripes were

attracted by his bold social program that allowed the past no quarter and

meant to put control of human destiny into human hands. Among those in

Owen's thrall were Mme. Fretageot and several of Maclure's closest

associates at the academy in Philadelphia. Maclure had doubts about

Owen's plan,9 but they were swept away in the enthusiasm for it that he

found upon returning to Philadelphia in July 1825. After his arrival there six months later, Maclure staked out administra

tive responsibility for all educational efforts in New Harmony while Owen

attempted to resolve the unexpected economic nightmares that had been

born with his Utopia through a series of reorganization schemes. Owen won

a bitter lawsuit against Maclure over their financial arrangements in May 1827 and then left New Harmony, effectively putting an end to the town's

socialist phase. Maclure, however, was determined to see his educational

program succeed. He remained in New Harmony for another year, until

his failing health forced him to seek a warmer climate in Mexico. By then he had established the rough equivalents of a contemporary kindergarten,

grade school, and vocational school. The scientists and educators who had

accompanied Maclure to New Harmony (including Thomas Say, Charles

LeSueur, and Gerald Troost, as well as Maclure's faithful Pestalozzian

coterie of Mme. Fretageot and M. d'Arusmont) finally had a forum for their progressive methods. Heavily subsidized by its founder, the school's

press published at least three landmark scientific imprints as well as the three volumes of Maclure's own Opinions.

These schools and the continued presence of Robert Owen's four sons as

well as Maclure's scientific colleagues in New Harmony after 1828 bear witness to Arthur Bestor's observation that, although what are now called

the town's "community days" might have ended with Owen's departure, "New Harmony as a

community set apart from others, dedicated to high intellectual and social ends, and more or less consciously offering itself as a

model for the future, was still alive."10

Maclure himself provides further evidence of New Harmony's continu

ing intellectual and political vitality in an article he wrote for his New Har

mony newspaper, the Disseminator of Useful Knowledge, in April 1828, describing a

recently organized "Society for Mutual Instruction":




composed of a number of persons, principally operatives [i.e., laborers

or craftsmen] who reside in Harmony. It is a mechanic's institution; it

differs only in name,?its object and means being exacdy the same as

the mechanics' institutions of this country and Europe, namely: to com

municate a general knowledge of the arts and sciences to those persons

who hitherto have been excluded from a scientific or general education.n

Maclure was not unaware, of course, of the mechanics' institutes that

had begun appearing in England early in the nineteenth century. By 1850

England was virtually saturated with about 700 institutes in towns and

villages of every size.12 These institutes sought to educate their members on

subjects of practical significance to their jobs. They were the means by which useful knowledge would be disseminated to the humblest laborer.

Their libraries were their central features. Thomas Kelly points out that

"there were other functions?lectures, classes, perhaps a museum and a

collection of scientific apparatus . . . but generally speaking it was the

library which became the heart and core of the institute."13

Maclure naturally saw the mechanics' institutes as the long overdue

vehicle to bring to workers the empowering knowledge deliberately kept from them for so long. Although the society he described in 1828 survived

for only nine months, Maclure did not give up on the idea of founding such an institute. Ten years later Maclure wrote to New Harmony from his

home in Mexico City to propose not just a mechanics' institute in New

Harmony, but a means by which hundreds might be founded throughout the United States.

Maclure set his plan for a system of working-class libraries in motion in

two letters to Achilles Fretageot: "Thinking it probable that the working classes of New Harmony are as well informed of their true interest in being instructed, or rather in instructing themselves, as in any other part of the

Union, I shall endow them with a house and land, and other necessaries to

make a beginning."14

In the second letter to Fretageot, Maclure made his only direct financial

contribution to the as yet unformed institute, a credit with American book

dealer Obadiah Rich's London shop for books worth up to two hundred

pounds. Maclure then described how his will would carry out his plans as

well as his fears that his will could be thwarted:

I have left a fund in the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, to be applied to the diffusion of useful knowledge after my death, restricted solely to such as labor with their hands. But aware how such

trusts have been misapplied, I am determined before I die to form as

many of these clubs or institutes, and endow them with the necessary

property that may enable them to go on and increase in utility.15



407

In response to these letters, forty-eight male residents of New Harmony

organized themselves into the New Harmony Working Men's Institute for

Mutual Instruction on 2 April 1838. The preamble to the constitution and

bylaws adopted by the institute that day described its goals as "to enable

[working men] to use their faculties in the best manner for their pecuniary

benefit, or the most rational enjoyment of life . . . and to bring scientific

and all other useful knowledge within the reach of Manual and Mechanical

Laborers, without the aid of professional men as teachers ... by means of

Reading, Lectures, Experiments, &c."16

Article 6 of the constitution limited membership to "any Working-man over the age of eighteen years, who gets his living by the labor of his

hands." Members would pay one dollar upon admission to the institute

and twenty-five cents per month afterward. In a reference to the economic

panic of 1837 the bylaws allowed that "during the pressure of the times the

admission fee of members be received in four weekly payments.'' Entries in

the institute's account books for these early years show that many members

did just that, faithfully paying their dues in pennies and half-pennies each

week. The bylaws provided for general weekly meetings of the institute on

Sunday afternoons at 2:30. At these meetings, members would rotate the

responsibility of delivering either a lecture or a reading. Each meeting would include two readings, "one on some scientific subject, the other in

light literature." All meetings took place in a wing of a building owned by Maclure known simply as "the hall," a Rappite church that had been turned

to various secular purposes by the nonsectarian Owenite community.

Between April 1838 and January 1840 eleven letters passed between the charter members of the Working Men's Institute (hereafter referred to as

the WMI) in New Harmony and their benefactor in Mexico City. The let ters from New Harmony

are not signed by an individual and are

clearly meant to represent the views of the institute as a whole.

One key issue dominates much of the early correspondence. Keenly aware of their benefactor's political orientation, the founders of the WMI

were quite concerned about to whom their institute should be open. The

question arises again and again in their letters to Maclure. As stipulated in

their constitution, membership was limited initially to "those who labor

with their hands.'' A list identifying all members and their occupations was

sent to Maclure at his request on 22 May 1839. The twenty-six members were

employed as tailors, carpenters, saddlers, wool-carders, brewers, and

in a dozen other similar occupations. But in the first letter to Maclure (23 April 1838), the founding members of the WMI expressed doubts that they would find the thirty working men that Maclure had defined as a minimum

membership to begin their institute. Apparently fewer than thirty of the

forty-eight signers of the constitution had been laborers willing to pay




membership dues. Maclure offered a solution to this dilemma in his 10

August reply: "If a sufficient number of industrious and sober working men cannot be found within the town to make a solid and respectable foun

dation, recourse must be had to the working farmers in the neighbourhood, as it is essential to the success of the Institute to begin on as broad and

respectable a base as possible." This remark is significant in that it defines

Maclure's essential conception of the institute as an organization for

laborers, whether of the mechanical or agricultural stripe. Maclure was

primarily interested in maintaining the distinction he had been making for

thirty years between self-interested capitalists and their dependent wage earners.17

The WMI's founders had an admission to make in their letter of

September 1838. Not only did they report that "our meetings are at all

times open to the public" but they also had already exceeded the step Maclure had suggested to expand their membership:

In a place like this, it is very difficult to draw the line and the majority of the members have always given it a liberal construction. In con

sequence persons have been admitted who do not strictly belong to

that class. For instance, a person who has hitherto been a working

man is advanced in years and finds it more convenient to take the

situation of clerk, in a store, having no direct interest in the capital of

the concern. . . . Such have been admitted, and it is thought ad

visable to extend the principle to all who are similarly situated, and

who have never been mechanical or manual laborers.

To this concern, Maclure replied, in a letter written the following

December, that the restriction to laborers had been inspired by his fear that

wealthy members, if admitted, would seize control of the institute and

frustrate his intentions. He had not meant, however, "to exclude those who

had labored with their hands, though they do not work at present; nor to

exclude clerks of the stores from the use of the Library."18

Yet even having enlarged the pool of potential members, the WMI still

found itself struggling to attract them, giving this account of its member

ship in the September 1838 letter: "There is from a dozen to twenty per sons who take a warm interest [in the institute] . . . about as many more

. . . profess to be desirous to promote it . . . but who do not take an active

interest in its concerns. The rest of the working part of the population are

lukewarm on the subject; individuals occasionally attend the meetings but

do not appear to care sufficiently to use any exertions in its favour." This

apathy is attributed to workers not having "been put on the right track in

their youthful days" through an exposure to books and learning and their

consequent failure to develop a lifelong "desire for information." To this



409

concern about working-class apathy toward the institute, Maclure

laconically replied, in his December 1838 letter, that "it is what I have

generally found in all countries."19

Within a year of its founding, the WMI had indeed begun liberalizing access to its library and in doing so started looking much more like a

modern public library providing services to all residents of a community rather than the mechanics' institutes it was modeled after. Two resolutions

passed on 17 February 1839 effectively removed most barriers to library ac

cess. The first resolution allowed "that persons paying 12 1/2 cts pr month

shall have the privilege of the Library the same as members." Members were

paying the same dues at the time. Nonmembers would not be allowed

to attend WMI meetings, however. The second resolution implied that the

families of WMI members had had "the privilege of the Library" all along:

"Young Persons between the age of Twelve and Eighteen?who have

neither Parents nor Guardians belonging to the Society?shall be allowed

to take Books from the Library."20 Circulation statistics cited at each semi

annual business meeting between October 1839 and October 1842 show that, of a total of 5,302 loans reported during that three-year period, 69 percent

were to WMI members and 31 percent to adult subscribers and minors.21

Three anonymous 1841 entries in the WMI's "suggestion book"22?

originally meant as a means for members to recommend titles for the

library?summed up what was apparently a lively and continuing local debate even after the adoption of these permissive measures. The first

writer supported an inclusive membership policy: "Our means of useful ness must depend on our number, and increase by accession of new mem

bers. ... I think Character and a sympathy with the Interests of Working Men may be a means of admission in accordance with the Spirit of the Con

stitution."

The second writer took the opposite view: "Should the laxity of duty in our offices, and the letter and spirit of our constitution be winked at for the

sake of pecuniary gain?" he asked. "Is there not a laxity in some of our

public offices, is there not a recklessness of the consequences?" The third writer pragmatically ignored these considerations when he

suggested altering the constitution "in regard to the admission of members, so that it should read

' any one applying to one or more members of the

committee &c' this being the practice at present, tho' certainly not agree able to the letter or spirit of that instrument."

WMI records identify new members only by name, not by occupation, after 1840. But an 1856 resolution that settled the membership question once and for all by admitting all adult males suggests that any membership restrictions had long since fallen by the way. The resolution, which dismissed as

"groundless" earlier concerns about the dangers of admitting non

laborers, was unanimously approved.23




Information on the nature of the contents of the WMI library in its first

years is limited. The WMI's letter of September 1838 identifies 49 of the

"upwards of 90 volumes of books" then in the library. With the exception of Maclure's collected Opinions,

a volume titled The Working Man's Compan

ion, and severed works on Pestalozzian education, the titles listed are all of

a technical or scientific nature. They include fifteen volumes of the London

Mechanical Magazine and four volumes of the Glasgow Mechanical Magazine, the journals of the mechanics' institutes of those two cities.24

The WMI published a catalog of its collection in 1840, but no copy of it

survives. The 1847 catalog of the WMI's collection is the first extensive

evidence of how well the WMI had attained its goal of providing '' useful in

formation" through a library.25 The catalog identifies 418 titles and 803

volumes in the following categories:

Science 16% Fiction 16%

History 11 %

Biography 10% Reference/Periodicals 10 % Travel 10% Literature 7 %

Religion/Philosophy 6% Economics 2 % Education 2%

Juvenilia 1 % Unidentifiable 9%

When compared to the catalogs of thirteen early social libraries in New

England analyzed by Jesse Shera,26 the WMI catalog is distinguished by its

emphasis on science and its lack of emphasis on religion. None of the Shera

catalogs (which include, by the way, the catalog of the Pittsford, Vermont,

library named for Maclure after his 1828 donation of $400) has a science

collection of more than 17 percent of its total, with most being far less.

Much greater variation is found in the percentage of religious titles. The

median is 22 percent. Maclure would have been pleased by these distinctive features, but, one

suspects, by little else. History did not fall within his strict definition of

useful knowledge, and, if biography is counted as history, the collection in

cludes more history than science. The large collection of fiction and the

smaller selection of poetry and drama would have had no place in his con

cept of a useful library. Maclure's contempt for works of the imagination

appears again and again in his essays and letters. But many of the books in

the WMI catalog do reveal the influence on the institute of either Maclure

or the town's free-thinking community period. The relatively few books on



411

religion included several titles that were attacks on organized religion (for

example, The Extraordinary Black Book). The books on economics included

several describing the advantages of various communitarian systems (such as J. A. Etzler's Paradise within the Reach of All Men) along with the apparent

ly popular The Curse of Paper-Money and Banking, an attack on current bank

ing practices by the Dickensian-sounding William Gouge. With the excep tion of Neil Arnott' s Elements of Physics, this was the book read from most

frequently at the institute's weekly meetings.

The readings chosen by the members for their weekly meetings are an

unmistakable and valuable indicator of local reading interests. While peer pressure to select an intellectual or

politically correct reading cannot be ruled

out, the range of subjects chosen is so broad and unpredictable that it ap

pears far more likely that each member felt quite free to read whatever he

chose before his fellow members when his turn came around. And though the nonscientific half of the reading program was meant to be of a light,

entertaining nature, the light reading was most likely to be a biography or

travel account. One can indeed study the thoughtful summaries of the week's readings and often find no trace of a text that would strike a con

temporary audience as frivolous or entertaining,

as when, on 20 January

1839, "Mr Macy read a lecture on Botany" and "Mr Burns Sen[ior] read a lecture on Morals by Francis Wright," or, on 28 April of that year, when

"George Fotherby read an article on spontaneous combustion and C. H.

White read an account of the Shakers." Biography, travel, science, and

education were the most frequent reading topics, with religion and

philosophy, physics, zoology, and economics also being popular. An alter native to a

reading was to deliver a lecture of one's own. Six WMI

members presented nineteen original lectures during the institute's first

two years. Eleven lectures dealt with scientific topics, eight with social or educational issues.27

Despite its ambitions, the institute by its own admission had failed to at tract all but a small percentage of the community's workers. Membership

was never more than forty-nine during this formative period, and only

thirty-seven members signed a plea for support to Maclure's sister Anna a

year after he died in 1840. The members who played key roles in the WMI's affairs at this time and for many years to come were individuals who had some connection to the town's community phase of the 1820s, most notably Achilles Fretageot and Richard Owen. Fifteen of the twenty six members identified in the WMI's May 1839 letter to Maclure were im

migrants from England, Scotland, or France. Four of six new members

identified in January 1840 were immigrants. A sympathetic attitude toward the community's original socialist and egalitarian ideals determined who did or did not belong to the institute much more than occupation did. The

WMI was common ground for men both wealthy and poor. The idea of a



412 L&C/ William Maclure

group effort to pool useful knowledge in order to strengthen the community

as a whole is very much in keeping with the community's original goals and

methods. Traces of the communal spirit remained and found an outlet in

the WMI. Any trace of economic communalism, however, had disap

peared by 1838. The founders of the WMI were not very different from the

civic-minded founders of the earliest social libraries in New England. In their last letter to Maclure in January 1840, the members of the WMI

literally swore allegiance to Maclure's political views: "We have vowed

eternal hostility to every system of Exclusive Monopoly and Exclusive

Privilege, and we will endeavor to . . . circulate the same opinion among

our fellow laborers."28 However, their actions, if not their words, suggest

that their common interests as residents of this frontier community had

superseded their class differences in a reversal of the way that the civil rights movement of the 1960s saw the common economic interests of black and

white workers superseded by imagined racial differences. The idea of a

socially stratified community?or, worse yet, a

community polarized be

tween working men and those who failed to qualify for that title?seems not

to have appealed at all to either WMI members or nonmembers. Some

New Harmony laborers embraced what was known locally as the "indi

vidual system" (in contrast to the "community system" of Owen) and

rejected the WMI and its program. Other laborers accepted the WMI as a

means of sharing primarily intellectual interests with both laborers and

nonlaborers. That New Harmony was not a representative frontier com

munity can hardly be disputed. Yet the decade that passed between the

failure of the Owen community and the establishment of the WMI is the

difference between the former's transplanted socialist fervor and the latter's

frontier pragmatism. While Maclure languished in a hospitable southern

climate after 1828 mulling over his failures and successes as a reformer, the

New Harmonists, native frontiersman and immigrant alike, were becom

ing Americans, exhibiting indifferent or confused attitudes toward the class

divisions that Maclure had projected onto American society as well as a

tolerant and enlightened self-interest.

The founding of the Boston Public Library in 1850 and the founding of

the American Library Association in 1876 are among the most important of

the rapid evolutionary strides leading to the contemporary public library.

However, the libraries that preceded these developments remain important alternative public library models. At worst, they represent evolutionary dead ends, abortive attempts at developing a philosophy and a material

base for an institution that would serve an ever-growing range of intellec

tual interests. At best, the strategies they offered for library service and the

reasons for the successes or failures of those strategies provide vital clues to

the motivations behind both the provision of public library services and

early unstudied information-seeking strategies. Far beyond the question of



413

direct influence on any current model, studies of these early libraries can

enlighten us about how their founders perceived the intersection of the

community and the intellect that is at the heart of every library.

Notes

1. Maclure, Observations on the Geology of the United States of America (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1817; rpt. Munich: Werner Fritsch, 1966), pp. [iii]-iv.

2. William Maclure, Opinions on Various Subjects, Dedicated to the Industrious Pro

ducers (New Harmony: School Press, 1831), p. 1.

3. Ibid., p. 32.

4. Ibid., p. 48.

5. Ibid., pp. 48-57.

6. Ibid., p. 47.

7. Arthur Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America: 1663-1829, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1970), pp. 147, 153.

8. John S. Doskey, The European Journals of William Maclure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988), pp. 721-722.

9. Arthur Bestor (ed.), Education and Reform at New Harmony: Correspondence of William Maclure and Marie Duclos Fretageot, 1820-1833 (Indianapolis: Indiana

Historical Society, 1948), p. 322.

10. Bestor, Backwoods Utopias, p. 201.

11. Disseminator, 26 April 1828, p. 121.

12. Thomas Kelly, Early Public Libraries: A History of Public Libraries in Great Britain

before 1850 (London: Library Association, 1966), p. 229.

13. Ibid., p. 229.

14. Maclure to Fretageot, 10 October 1837, Working Men's Institute, WMI Ms.

Series I, folder 47.

15. Maclure to Fretageot, 1 December 1837, WMI Ms. Series I, folder 47.

16. WMI minutes in WMI Ms. Series III, vol. 1.

17. Maclure to WMI, 25 December 1838, WMI Ms. Series III, vol. 1. The 1840

census reveals that New Harmony was, in fact, unusually fertile ground for the kind

of labor-oriented organization that Maclure had made it clear he sought to establish

(U.S. Census Office, Sixth Census or Enumeration of the Inhabitants of the United States, as

Corrected at the Department of State, in 1840 [Washington, D.C: Blair and Rives,

1841]). Defining as an adult anyone over the age of fifteen, 590 adult males lived in Har

mony Township in 1840. (The total population for the township was 1,764. Women are not identified by occupation in the census.) The census consistently identifies

four major occupational categories: agriculture, commerce, manufactures and

trades, and learned professions and engineers. These four categories account for 98

percent of the male work force in the United States and all but 102 of the 590 adult

males in Harmony:

Agriculture 280 (57%) Commerce 54 (11%)

Manufactures and trades 146 (30 %) Learned professions and engineers 8 (2%)

488 (100%)




A comparison of these numbers to those for Indiana and for Posey County outside

of Harmony shows Harmony to have had a very unusual labor force. Black

Township, which included Mount Vernon, the only town in Posey County larger

than New Harmony, had only 8.5 percent of its population employed in manufac

turing and trades. Of the 86 men in Posey County employed in commerce 54 lived

in Harmony. The ratio of jobs in agriculture to jobs in manufacturing and trade was

7.25 to 1 for all of Indiana, 10 to 1 in Black Township, 17 to 1 for all of Posey

County outside of Harmony Township, but only 2 to 1 for Harmony itself. Half of

Posey County's manufacturing and trade employment was in Harmony. Even

given that Harmony was a small township, the number of men employed in non

agricultural occupations suggests that its economy was a combination of

agricultural, commercial, and industrial elements that was very unusual if not

unknown on the frontier of that time. The small industries that had been established

by the immigrants to the Owenite community in order to create a self-sufficient

community had not died.

18. Maclure to WMI, 25 December 1838, WMI archives.

19. WMI Ms. Series III, vol. 1.


21. Ibid., vol. 1.

22. Ibid., vol. 6.

23. Ibid., vol. 2.

24. WMI to Maclure, 9 September 1838; WMI Ms. Series III, vol. 1.

25. Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Library Belonging to the New Harmony

Working Men's Institute, with a Catalogue of Its Books (New Harmony, Indiana: [The

Institute], 1847). 26. Jesse Shera, Foundations of the Public Library: The Origins of the Public Library

Movement in New England, 1629-1855 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949),

p. 103.


28. Ibid.



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