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Fanatical Yankee Utopians
Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Lew
Rockwell.com
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
In his brilliant LRC article, "The Yankee Problem in America,"
Clyde Wilson describes how America came to be ruled by a peculiar
sect of religious, statist fanatics that originated in New England
and became known as "Yankees." Not all Northerners are/were
"Yankees," Professor Wilson wrote, for many are obviously
fine people. He was referring to "that peculiar ethnic group
descended from New Englanders, who can be easily recognized by
their arrogance, hypocrisy, greed, lack of congeniality, and penchant
for ordering other people around." They "have never
given up the notion that they are the chosen saints whose mission
is to make America, and the world, into the perfection of their
own image." Today we would call them "neocons"
or "Hillary Clinton supporters."
A "Yankee" is "self-righteous, ruthless, and self-aggrandizing,"
which is why Hillary Clinton is "a museum-quality specimen
of the Yankee," writes Professor Wilson. The Yankee temperament,
moreover, "makes a neat fit with the Stalinism that was brought
into the Deep North by later immigrants." (He was obviously
referring to the burgeoning communist movement in New York City
in the early twentieth century, which produced so-called "red
diaper babies" such as the former communist rabble rouser
David Horowitz.)
In another LRC essay entitled "Saint Hillary and the Religious
Left," Murray Rothbard noted the tendency of the Yankees,
rooted in New England, upstate New York, and the upper Mid-West
in the nineteenth century, to embark on a "fanatical drive"
in "devoting tireless energy to bringing about, as rapidly
as they can, their own egalitarian, collectivist version of a
Kingdom of God on Earth." The Yankee "kingdom"
is "egalitarian and collectivist, with private property stamped
out, and the world being run by a cadre or vanguard of Saints."
(Article continues below)
Even when the Yankees embraced abolitionism it was rarely, if
ever, because of any concern about the well-being of slaves. As
Professor Wilson writes: "abolitionism, as opposed to antislavery
sentiment shared by many Americans, including Southerners . .
. was not based on sympathy for the black people nor on an ideal
of natural rights. It was based on the hysterical conviction that
Southern slaveholders were evil sinners who stood in the way of
fulfillment of America’s divine mission to establish Heaven
on Earth . . . . [M]any abolitionists expected that evil Southern
whites and blacks would disappear and the land be repopulated
by virtuous Yankees."
Armed with this fanatical, socialistic, utopian ideology, Yankees
crusaded to stamp out all "sin," which included at various
times private property ownership, alcohol, tobacco, marriage,
the family, any form of entertainment, meat eating, and the Catholic
church. Today’s Yankee, writes Professor Wilson, is the
"builder of the all-powerful ‘multicultural’
therapeutic state (with himself giving the orders and collecting
the rewards) which is the perfection of history and which is to
be exported to all peoples, by guided missiles on women and children
if necessary . . ."
In his new book, A Conservative History of the American Left,
Daniel J. Flynn devotes most of the first hundred pages to describing
various parts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Yankee-ism.
There was Ann Lee, who migrated from England to New England around
the time of the American Revolution and became a leader of the
Shakers, who were known to shake violently and speak in tongues.
She believed she was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ and was
obsessed with accusing others of "whoredom" and bestiality,
among other things.
The Shakers spread "from New York and New England,"
to Ohio and Kentucky, and considered communism to be a part of
their "religion." They opposed marriage and the family
as being in opposition to communism, just as The Communist Manifesto
did.
Then there were the "Harmonists" or "Rappites,"
founded by one George Rapp in the early 1800s in Harmony, Indiana.
Rapp enforced a "puritan atmosphere" where, after he
fathered four children, he forbade his followers from having sex.
Rapp’s followers followed his every direction as he promised
them a communist utopia on Earth.
The "Zoarites" of eastern Ohio attempted to create
another communistic utopia in the 1830s. "In heaven there
is only communism" was their credo. They promised to eliminate
selfishness, bad habits, and vices generally.
Perhaps the most famous Yankee socialist experiment was the one
in New Harmony, Indiana, which was renamed from George Rapp’s
Harmony by one Robert Owen. New Harmony, founded in 1826, was
based on the idea that private property is "absurd and irrational."
Owen sought to eliminate private property as well as personal
responsibility, the family, religion, and marriage in order to
produce his own version of heaven on earth. There were Owenite
clubs in various communities in America, and it was the Owenites
who coined the word "socialism." Their core belief was
the abrogation of individual responsibility. The state, run by
people like themselves, should be responsible for everything instead.
Man is not responsible for his own actions, they said. Based on
such a harebrained philosophy, New Harmony only lasted for two
years. Despite the disaster of New Harmony, there were various
Owenite copycats, such as Ohio’s Friendly Association for
Mutual Interests and the Yellow Springs (Ohio) community, each
of which lasted only a few months.
In a chapter entitled "Yankee Utopians" Daniel Flynn
describes the huge popularity of Owen’s successor, the Frenchman
Charles Fourier, who never came to America himself, although his
philosophy did. Like Owen and the others, Fourier claimed to have
been personally informed of "God’s Plan" for humanity
and generously shared it with others. The plan included the abolition
of marriage, of free enterprise and private property, and of traditional
religion. It advocated communal living and "free love,"
which would supposedly "level the erotic playing field for
the ugly, shy, and awkward."
Many of New England’s and New York’s leading citizens
were devotees of Fourierism. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley
extolled Fourier’s ideas on the front page of his newspaper
in 1842 and continued to promote them for years.
Fourier’s philosophy came to be known as "associationalism,"
which was championed in New England by the "Transcendentialists."
"From their Puritan forbears," Flynn writes, "Transcendentalists
retained moral righteousness" and "the conviction that
they were the elect." Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the
best known of this peculiar sect, which founded another communistic
society called "Brook Farm" in Massachusetts. Novelist
Nathaniel Hawthorne celebrated these "communitarians"
in his novel, The Blithedale Romance. Meanwhile, Brook Farm was
populated mostly by "Boston Brahmins, Harvard graduates,"
and "descendants of the Pilgrims."
In true Yankee fashion Ralph Waldo Emerson described various
Foureristic fads as vegetarianism, free love, séances,
water cures, and temperance as "a fertility of projects for
the salvation of the world!" Even the insects would be "protected"
in the new communistic utopia, wrote Emerson, with a society that
stood "for the protection of ground-worms, slugs and mosquitoes
. . ."
Horace Greeley announced that he would rather be president of
a Fourier community known as the "North American Phalanx"
than president of the United States. Twenty-nine Fourier communities
were eventually created, none of which lasted for more than two
years despite the extreme enthusiasm for them by New England’s
best and brightest.
Despite all of these miserable failures, Greeley’s New
York Tribune continued to promote them. Ralph Waldo Emerson was
persuaded to participate in another Massachusetts "associationalist"
community that was appropriately named "Fruitland,"
populated by such nuts as one Samuel Larned, "a vegetarian
who dined exclusively on apples one year and crackers the next
. . ."
A large number of prominent New Englanders who would hold key
positions in the Lincoln administration or in the U.S. Army in
the 1860s participated in the "delusional schemes "
of "this muddleheaded lunatic" [Fourier], writes Flynn.
In addition to Greeley, this included Charles Dana, who would
be Lincoln’s assistant secretary of defense; Robert Gould
Shaw, the leader of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Infantry Regiment
during the War Between the States who spent his childhood at Brook
Farm; the abolitionist Theodore Weld; and William Henry Channing,
the chaplain of Congress during the War Between the States.
As Professor Wilson noted, upstate New York became part of the
"Yankee Belt" by the nineteenth century. So the region
was naturally hospitable to John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the
Oneida Community and author of a book entitled History of American
Socialisms. Noyes called himself a "perfectionist,"
as did his followers. "Most perfectionists," Flynn wrote,
were "descendants of New England Puritans." They eventually
came to call themselves "Bible Communists." They practiced
"free love" where women were considered to be "community
property." Children were removed from their parents shortly
after birth and raised by "the community." The notion
that "it takes a village to raise a child" is a very
old communistic idea. Like all the other communities based on
communistic ideas, Oneida collapsed after only a few years.
After the failed socialist revolutions in France and Germany
in 1848, the Yankee Belt proved to be hospitable to immigrant
intellectuals and political rabble-rousers from those countries
who wanted to plant the seeds of communism in America. One Joseph
Wedemeyer "laid the groundwork for bringing socialism from
Europe to America" and found a "home" for the publication
of the writings of Marx and Engels "in Horace Greeley’s
. . . New York Tribune" which had "played so crucial
a role in propagandizing for that earlier socialist prophet Charles
Fourier." Various communist clubs were established which
became affiliated with the First International, which was vigorously
supported by Greeley and Massachusetts politician Wendell Phillips.
The Yankees of New England, Northern New York, Pennsylvania and
Ohio, and the upper Mid-West (the Yankee Belt) would eventually
support a presidential candidate who appeared to be as odd and
peculiar as the Fouriers, Rappites, and Owens’s. He was
a teetotaler who disavowed traditional religion by never becoming
a Christian or joining any church; he was a lifelong manic-depressive
who was so obsessed with talking about suicide that his friends
once removed all knives and razors from his house. He attended
séances and wrote poems about suicide with titles like
"The Suicide’s Soliloquy." He suffered several
nervous breakdowns; took a primitive anti-depression drug that
contained a heavy dose of mercury; consumed opiates and cocaine;
and is said to have "gone crazy" according to some of
his closest friends. He spent much of his life brooding in misery
over the fact that he may die before ever becoming famous. I am
talking about Abraham Lincoln, as described in the book Lincoln’s
Melancholy, by Joshua Wolf Shenck. It was Lincoln, more than anyone
else, who saw to it that America would be ruled to this day by
Yankee utopians who are still hard at work trying to create their
own version of heaven on earth (and profiting very handsomely
while they’re at it).
The remaining chapters of A Conservative History of the American
Left contain very well researched descriptions and analyses of
all varieties of American statists, from the "progressives"
to the New Dealers, twentieth-century communists, the "New
Left" ("Same as the Old Left," says Flynn), and
the politically-correct totalitarians who rule today’s college
campuses.
One glaring omission, however, is that Flynn doesn’t make
the obvious connection between the Yankee utopians of the nineteenth
century and today’s "neocons." The Bush regime
– and the Republican Party generally – is completely
dominated by neocons with the Yankee mentality described in the
first paragraphs of this article: arrogant, ruthless utopians
who believe they have a God-given right to remake the entire world
in their own image. As such, they belong on "the American
Left," not the right, as Professor Paul Gottfried has repeatedly
argued.
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