western geology; Joseph Neef, a
well-known Pestalozzian educator, together with two French experts in
that system; and Owen's four brilliant sons. A few artists and
musicians and all sorts of reformers, including Fanny Wright, an
ardent and very advanced suffragette, joined these scientists in the
new Eden. Owen had issued a universal invitation to the "industrious
and well disposed," but his project offered also the lure of a free
meal ticket for the improvident and the glitter of novelty for the
restless.

"I am come to this country," Owen said in his opening words at New
Harmony, "to introduce an entire new state of society, to change it
from the ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system,
which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all
causes for contests between individuals."[19] But the germs of
dissolution were already present in the extreme individuality of the
members of this new society. Here was no homogeneous horde of docile
German peasants waiting to be commanded. What Father Rapp could do,
Owen could not. The sifting process had begun too late. Seven
different constitutions issued in rapid succession attempted in vain
to discover a common bond of action. In less than two years Owen's
money was gone, and nine hundred or more disillusioned persons
rejoined the more individualistic world. Many of them subsequently
achieved distinction in professional and public callings. Owen's
widely advertised experiment was fecund, however, and produced some
eleven other short-lived communistic attempts, of which the most noted
were at Franklin, Haverstraw, and Coxsackie in New York, Yellow
Springs and Kendal in Ohio, and Forestville and Macluria in Indiana.

Fourierism found its principal apostle in this country in Arthur
Brisbane, whose _Social Destiny of Man_, published in 1840, brought to
America the French philosopher's naive, social regimen of reducing
the world of men to simple units called phalanxes, whose barrack-like
routine should insure plenty, equality, and happiness. Horace Greeley,
with characteristic, erratic eagerness, pounced upon the new gospel,
and Brisbane obtained at once a wide circle of sympathetic readers
through the _Tribune_. Thirty-four phalanxes were organized in a short
time, most of them with an incredible lack of foresight. They usually
lasted until the first payment on the mortgage was due, though a few
weathered the buffetings of fortune for several years