The American Civil War (1861-1865) marks a break between a period of practical experiences with small agricultural cooperatives, such as Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, which was based on transcendentalist ideals, and an era characterized by a more politically motivated search for happiness on a national scale. The small-scale communitarian experiments in the United States, inspired by Emersonian transcendentalism, socialist utopianism, or religious millenarianism, met with adversity; most were soon dissolved. For instance, Brook Farm existed only from 1841 to 1847, and the Icarian community in Nauvoo, Illinois, which was founded by Étienne Cabet in 1849, lasted no more than ten years. The religiously inspired sectarian communities of the Shakers and the Oneida group had a longer life but remained small-scale endeavors (Kumar 1987). As mentioned earlier, The Communist Manifesto had ridiculed these sporadic experiments as creations of a “new Jerusalem in duodecimo.”

The smallest but perhaps most famous experiment was that of Henry David Thoreau, who between 1845 and 1847 lived in the woods near Walden Pond, not far from Concord, Massachusetts, and reported on his experiences in his partly fictionalized Walden (1854). Thoreau, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, did not establish a community but is nevertheless commonly considered to have created one man’s eutopia. He sought the solitude of the woods, although occasionally he received visitors from nearby Concord or went himself to that town. He was a romantic individualist, a solitary mystic waiting for sublime moments of unison with nature. Most of all he wanted to be a free man, free from economic bonds and superfluous duties, seeking leisure and time for reading and contemplation. In his autobiographical notes the aim of individual bliss has completely eclipsed that of collective happiness. Only later did he become interested in political action.

Looking Backward and the Nationalist movement

The devastating war between the Unionists and the Confederates, in which more than half a million men died, had made the exigency of social organization acute. After four years of intense combat, the Union victory, which put an end to slavery throughout the country, confirmed the unity of the American nation, making the United States more nationalistic than it had been ever before.