BackStory; A Whole New World: A History of Utopias

This is backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. America has created hundreds of utopian communities over the years from the shakers in the 18th century to the hippie communes of the 1960s. Members of the O'Nighter community in upstate New York believed the path to perfection lay in sharing everything. Meals, housing, childcare, spouses. It's not just men who would have multiple wives but women who would have multiple husbands. In the 1880s, industrialist George Pullman tried to create a capitalist utopia for his employees. He built a picture perfect town for the perfect worker. The people who are coming here are simply interested in having a job. They're not necessarily interested in being perfected. As many Americans look for a fresh start after the long 2016 election, we've got stories of people starting over. A history of utopias coming up on backstory. Major funding for backstory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation,

and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. This is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Peter Onuf, you're with Ed Ayers. Hey Peter, and Brian Ballot. Hey guys, since we're diving right into our show on utopias, I thought we could start with a place discovered by three intrepid Americans back in 1915. Well, that seems pretty fitting since there's three of us. Lead on, Brian. Yeah, more fitting than you might guess, Peter. Three male explorers discover an all-female nation. And it's aptly named her land. Well, I guess that would be not my land. Okay, have it your way, Peter.

By the way, that's Kristen Egan, an English professor at Mary Baldwin College. And what we find out in regards to the history of her land is it hasn't always been an all-female nation. It used to be a nation of men and women. But thousands of years ago, the men had descended the mountain to fight a war. And then there was a natural disaster, which killed all the men off. I just hate when that happens. Yeah, bye-bye, guys. Of course, her land wasn't a real place. It was a novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a well-known feminist and author around the turn of the 20th century. Gilman imagined an ideal country where women didn't need men at all. This came as a bit of shock to those three explorers. They come in assuming that a land full of women will be uncivilized and undeveloped and that the women will be combative because apparently they assume that a group of women cannot get along. However, when they arrive in her land, that is not the case.

It's a very civilized nation. It's very well developed. It has industry and infrastructure. And the women cooperate. They have an existence which is essentially socialist. The women practice composting. They practice sustainable agriculture. It just goes on and on. So they're doing everything they can to create an environment that is sustainable. Well, I can think of one thing they need to be truly sustainable. Children, it's kind of hard to have them without men around. Well, you got to point there, Peter. Like a lot of fantasy novels. It's probably best not to analyze the details of her land all too closely. Let's just say that some of the women have figured out a way to produce daughters all by themselves. Better still, without men to muck things up, these women are able to create a really pristine utopia. None of the crime or pollution that plagues the outside world. You know, the one controlled by men.

They comment about how there's no dirt, there's no smoke, and there's no noise. The streets of her land were as dustless as a well-swept floor. And the country itself is as neat as a Dutch kitchen. But her land also has a dark side. Those dustless and well-swept streets are only possible because a lot of women are excluded as well. The women are described as being of Aryan heritage, and they practice eugenics. So they're trying to maintain a very specific genetic base for this community. And anybody that's deemed unfit is discouraged from breeding. Her land was published in the midst of the eugenics movement, where scientific theories about racial purity were linked to qualities like intelligence, cleanliness, and behavior. It's a disturbing fantasy from the vantage point of the 21st century.

But it's also a reflection of a time in American history when white supremacy used pseudoscience to justify violence and discrimination against minorities. And while her land is a fictional world, there have been thousands of efforts to build utopian communities throughout American history. Places with groups of Americans tried to create a more perfect world for themselves. And all of these communities were both the reflection of and reaction to the world around them. So today on the show, we're going to look at some of those utopian experiments. We'll hear about the Onida community in the 19th century, whose members practice something they called biblical communism. We'll also look at railroad owner George Pullman's ill-fated attempt to create a workers paradise for his employees. And we'll chat with someone who's belonged to an intentional community for more than 30 years. You know, guys, I really don't like to hold the fact that the 19th century really embodies everything really worth talking about in America.

Yeah, that much. Well, just once per show. Generally, today, I think I'm on pretty strong ground, and I say this with a great sense of humility. If you want utopianism, we got the market cornered. For some reason, in the period between the revolution and the Civil War, we thought utopias were around every corner. You know, for virtually every decade of those years, we came up with some great idea for building the perfect community. So you might think about the Mormons in the 1830s who have a message from God that tells them how to create a perfect society that even reaches into eternity. Then the 1840s, this really takes off in lots of experimental communities around Boston when people think you might be able to combine literature and agriculture in some kind of perfect community. And then there's Onida about which we'll talk about pretty soon, which is amazing. So whatever decade you choose before the American Civil War, we have a utopian community for you.

And what I want to know is why couldn't you guys lay the foundations for that earlier or build upon it later? Well, in some ways that we did in the 1860s. Yeah, you always say that. Yeah, well, let me put it this way though. I think you're right. I think the kind of utopias you're talking about, these perfect communities. Well, no, the United States was supposed to be a perfect republic. And that's the whole society. This was something new under the sun as Jefferson put it. This was a new way of self-government. So it wasn't just for those people who would descend and who would turn away from mainstream society. There was this moment in which the mainstream was the future. And I think that energy is still there in the communities you're talking about. But now it's taken the position on the margins, very self-consciously, dissenting from the character of early American society and all its business, all its enterprise, all its todreness to make something better. So I think you had to have that foundation, that notion of perfectability of a new world.

And then you have proliferation of these new worlds, these new communities, which in many ways take their bearings against the dominant mass society that emerges in Jacksonian America. Well, I have to admit, you just ruined my utopian vision of owning this coin. Yeah, I mean, you've got the whole nation. I would believe would trump these little isolated and often failing communities. So Brian, how about you? Well, I just want to say that Peter may have the whole nation, but that nation was huddled along the eastern seaport. And I think one of the reasons that you had so many disparate utopian communities was you had something that Peter really didn't have, which was space, right? You spread out across the entire continent. And you also were not as connected as you would be in the last part of the 19th century. You really didn't have the railroads connecting the nation, not even all that many steamboats connecting the nation.

And it would be the 1840s before the telegraph came along. So I think one of the keys to having so many utopian communities is the ability to get away from that larger society that Peter talked about. And that took space. Yeah, Brian, which leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that our utopian vision of the early 19th century is based upon taking so much land away from American Indians. I think that's a dark underside of these utopian communities, Ed. I'd be curious, Peter, or Ed, whether there are any other common elements to this efflorescence of utopian communities. Well, I think all of them represent fundamental challenges to the basic premises of American society. And that is they may have stolen land or used land previously stolen from the native inhabitants, but they had a vision of a better and a different new world that was going to come alive in these local communities. It was rejecting private property, even in some cases, rejecting the family form marriage, all of these things which were the Holy of Holies for Americans generally.

This was a truly radical challenge to those fundamental values. So we have to blame you for that, too. Basically, once you guys took the lid off this whole idea of monarchy and governing yourself, some people say, yeah, I like to govern myself all the way down to own sexuality and our own use of property. I think you got it, Ed. If you look in your kitchen cabinet, there's a decent chance that your knives, forks, and spoons were made by a company called Onida. Now, there's something that sets this silverware apart from other brands.

The Onida Corporation grew out of one of the most radical utopian experiments in the 19th century, a religious commune known as the Onida Community. Established in 1848 by a self-styled preacher named John Humphrey Noise, the Onida Community flourished for three decades. Molly Jessup is an historian who works at the Onida Mansion House, a sprawling 93,000 square foot complex that the community built for its members in upstate New York. She says that noise considered himself a religious perfectionist. That meant that Christians could be free from sin in their lifetime, and in fact, they could create paradise on earth. So, he developed this social program of Bible Communism to prepare perfect society. Boy, I've heard of the Communist manifesto, but Bible Communism, that surely is not a phrase you hear every day. No, I have to admit that it's not Brian. I could try to explain it for you, but instead, let Molly Jessup do that for us. Mental Communism was an idea that they should live in a manner similar to the apostles in the first Christians, as one family sharing all things.

They believed that the worst thing that people could be was selfish, so that you should be as selfless as possible in all things that you did. Now, that all sounds pretty virtuous, but Jessup says that noise's view on sharing did not include only property that reached into personal relationships. We should probably say that if you have young children listening, we're going to be talking about some adult issues for the next few minutes, because members of the ONADA community shared each other in a practice known as complex marriage. It's not just men who would have multiple wives, but women who would, in theory, have multiple husbands. These ideas were quite controversial, as you can imagine. Society tended to value piety and purity in women, so the fact that you would have a community that would say sex is a right of worship. It's an experience meant to be enjoyed, and there shouldn't be stigma for having multiple sexual partners is certainly shocking to a lot of people. But this is actually fairly highly regulated, right? Can you explain what these kind of relationships would look like in practice?

Oh, yes. So for their physical relationships, again, they viewed sex as a right of worship. So if someone was interested in setting up what they called a social interview with someone else, you would go to an intermediary, usually a member of the Central Council, and you would ask them to find out if the potential partners also interested in you. If they were, the intermediary could set up a time and a place for you all to meet. And if the person wasn't interested, people in this community did have the option of saying, no, I'm not interested, which again is pretty revolutionary compared to marriages outside of the community where a woman was often viewed as her husband's property. Now, I don't want to be sacrilegious, but this sounds a little bit like Tinder, doesn't it? I mean, but here you have an elder who says, well, you both have sort of swiped in the same direction. We would arrange that.

Yes, I think so. And it is very much what we would term today a sex positive community where they thought there shouldn't be shame or hesitation in sexual relationships. So in their social interview process, though, they would also discourage you from spending the night with someone after sexual intercourse. They were concerned about you developing that sticky or special love as they called it that would lead to monogamous feelings towards someone. Did this breed a lot of happiness or unhappiness or some combination of that? I would certainly say there's a combination of happiness and unhappiness, depending on who the people are. You do have another example of Victor Hawley and Mary Ryan, who fell in love with each other, wanted to have a monogamous relationship, couldn't have that in the community and eventually seceded and left the community to be married. Eventually, there were 300 people there, so you can imagine that there's a range of motivations for why they were in the community. There's a range of what their experiences were like there and you have people who realize it's not for them and they succeed on their own. So with all these regulated social interviews, what was the role of reproduction in that?

So for the first 20 years of the community, they didn't have many children. They practiced a form of birth control known as male continents. So in this form of birth control, men are supposed to stop themselves before they reach climax. So men in this community were the ones who were responsible for birth control. So there were always children in the community because people joined as families and there were a few unexpected blessings every year. The community decided to have children in 1869. And at that point, they were very interested in science. They were interested in whether or not spirituality could be a genetically transmitted trait. So they began a program that they called stirpaculture. And you could sort of think of it as a kind of spiritual eugenics. So the children board in that time period are called stirpacults. Did that phrase catch on? I think the United community are the only ones who use it. A word unique to them.

So once the children were born, what did stirpaculture look like in raising children? So throughout the United community's existence, children were raised communally. Just like they were worried about sticky or special love between adults and exclusive relationships, they were worried about the selfish love a mother might have towards her own biological child. Like a woman might be criticized for the sin of phylogogenitiveness, which would be loving your child more than you loved all community children. I hate it when that happens. So what is actually sustaining this organization? It sounds large. I know they flourish. How do they combine these radical ideas of social relations with something that allows them to succeed financially? So although they practiced Bible Communism, they were actually pretty good capitalists. So their major industry during the religious community was metal animal traps. And they used the money from animal traps to diversify the other things that they did.

They also died silk thread. They had fruit canning and at their Connecticut branch, they started to make spoons. So people have heard of Onida as a kind of trademark today. How did we go from this perfectionist community to something that people recognize in the consumer market today? It was the community themselves who voted to disband in 1880. One reason there was a lot of internal dissension about leadership, a second reason, having children really created nuclear families within this larger whole. And the third reason was that they were facing a lot of outside pressure and criticism of their institution of complex marriage. And they wanted to continue to run their successful businesses to benefit former members. So they became a joint stock company in 1881. As they moved towards the 20th century, they assessed the market and where things were going and decided that silverware was going to be their best bet forward.

They had better than animal traps. So they looked at this emerging market of young women getting married and needing to buy silverware and decided to go all in on silverware for young married people. So they sold the animal trap business in 1924 and they focused on silverware throughout the 20th century. So the factory that they built in the 1860s is still operational today. It's about a mile from the mansion house. And there's actually descendants of the United community who still live in the mansion house. Only in America. You really have to believe, don't you think? Molly Jessup is curator of education at the Onada Community Mansion House in Onada, New York.

We're going to turn now to a type of community you might not think of as Utopian a company town. But in the 1880s railroad industrialist George Pullman built one so lovely that a London newspaper called it the most perfect town in the world. This most perfect town was a reaction to the mounting labor strife of the gilded age and Pullman envisioned it as a kind of capitalist Utopia. But as producer Jake Smith reports, it did not exactly turn out that way. On the prairie, a few miles outside of Chicago, George Pullman created the town of Pullman to house the thousands of workers who built his opulent train cars. This was in the early 1880s. And he designed the town to make those workers happy. The row houses were bright and spacious with state of the art plumbing and heating. It was a stark contrast to the dirty, crowded, tenement houses where most of Chicago's factory workers lived. The town of Pullman had all the amenities, a shopping center, sports teams, a town band, a church. There were no saloons and no rowdy drunks on those tree line streets.

George Pullman made sure of that. From the outside, it looked like paradise. But inside Pullman, something was off. Jane Baxter is an anthropologist at the Paul University. So, you know, there's this thing that it's possible to be crushed by a ton of feathers. And even though it's just one light little feather at a time, it all adds up to a ton. The Pullman experiment was a response to the growing labor strife of the 1870s. The US was in the throes of a deep depression, with unemployment reaching 30 to 40%. At the same time, the labor movement was getting stronger and growing increasingly militant. In 1877, a peaceful railroad strike that started in Pittsburgh, spread across the country and turned bloody. Shelton Stromquist is a labor historian at the University of Iowa. I mean, you can imagine this Americans across the country waking up and opening their newspapers and seeing headlines that covered the first, second, third, fourth pages. Detailing, not just what happened in Pittsburgh, but what was happening in Baltimore and Hornelsville and eventually Chicago and St. Louis.

Stromquist says that for railroad owners, the strike in 1877 posed an existential threat. They were terrified that the capitalist system would collapse in the face of these worker uprisings. Many railroad managers just wanted to quash the uprisings. But George Pullman thought that if he could make his workers happier, they wouldn't want to strike. When Pullman dedicates the town of Pullman, he says, sort of flat out, conditions have been created here so that there'll be no need for collective action and labor strife that exists elsewhere in America. That's Jane Baxter again. She says that Pullman wasn't trying to change the capitalist system. He was trying to make it work better for his employees and for his bottom line. The other thing that he's doing is he's taking and wrapping in all the costs of building this company town and the workers are paying for it in rent. And through that, he's able to pay his shareholders a 6% return of investment. It seemed like a perfect system. Workers got nice homes, Pullman got to charge them rent, no labor strife, and shareholders would get a hefty profit.

If this worked, it could be the new model for all of American industry. And George Pullman was a gifted salesman. Reporters from all around the world flocked to Pullman and rapsdized about the verdant lawns, the carefully crafted homes, how perfect and happy everything seemed in this real life utopia. Everything, but not everyone. Here's one giveaway. Census records reveal that turnover among workers in Pullman was quite high. And there's a very famous and I can only paraphrase it, quote, by a resident of Pullman who said, you know, we work in a Pullman factory, we sleep in a Pullman bed, we shop at a Pullman store and when we die, we'll go to a Pullman hell. As an archaeologist, Baxter decided to dig up some backyards in Pullman for more clues about what it was like to live there. And she found something really odd. Here in Pullman, the backyards are empty for the period of company control of the town, which was shocking. Anybody who's listening to this, who has a backyard, a guarantee stuff of yours is already in the backyard even if you've only been living there a few months, you have dropped something.

To find nothing in the backyards of Pullman suggests that George Pullman cared more about keeping everything looking for steam than about his workers truly feeling at home. Must have been oppressive. You have this beautiful town and it doesn't seem like people are really being allowed to use any of it in an organic way that we would take for granted. But it wasn't just the backyards. The more Baxter looked, the more this picture of a worker's paradise just disintegrated. She also discovered that the factory breakrooms were strictly segregated so that skilled workers didn't have to mix with the unskilled workers. More tellingly, company records revealed that the workers were getting seriously injured at the Pullman factory. And they've repeatedly gone on strike to protest their working conditions. So I think it's really useful to see it as a series of small challenges and insults and issues that we're adding up for these workers that then turned into the Pullman strike. On May 11th, 1894, some 2500 workers gathered at the factory entrance.

The country is in very severe depression. And so, you know, Pullman, who ultimately was all about maintaining the profitability of his enterprise, was cutting wages along with other people. And he was also not reducing rents on his employees even though it was quite clear that their ability to meet their rents was declining sharply. A few days before the strike, a group of workers had tried to tell George Pullman that they were struggling to feed their families, let alone pay rent, but Pullman refused to meet with them. Instead, he fired them, and that was the final straw. On May 11th, nearly the entire factory force showed up but refused to work. The American Railway Union agreed to support the Pullman strike by refusing to move any trains with Pullman cars. This boycott brought rail traffic everywhere west of Chicago to a standstill. You halt the rails and you halt the movement of the U.S. mail. So if the U.S. mail isn't moving, that's actually a federal crime. And it allows the President of the United States to call in federal troops to break the strike.

Which is exactly what happened. President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to Pullman, the strike and the boycott fizzled within a month, but not before soldiers shot into a crowd killing at least half a dozen Pullman workers. After the strike, the President appointed a commission to investigate the causes. And the commission found that George Pullman could have prevented the whole ordeal if he had simply negotiated with his workers. The self-styled savior of the working class had cared more about his bottom line than about talking to the men who built his luxury train cars. Pullman died of a heart attack three years later and his company lost his beloved town soon after. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the Pullman company could operate a town or a factory but not both. The company had to sell off the town. Today, Chicago is so sprawling that Pullman is a neighborhood in the city limits and most of the houses that Pullman built for his workers in the 1880s are still standing. So why did Pullman's grand utopian experiment fail?

Jane Baxter says that Pullman's fatal flaw was a certainty that he knew what his workers wanted. The people who were coming here are simply interested in having a job. They're not necessarily interested in being perfected or sort of becoming more content. Jane Baxter shows me an old picture of a Pullman palace car with its plush seats intricate woodwork and ornate designs. And in the back of the image, there's this ghost-like blur of a person, a Pullman worker. Looking straight back at the camera, he doesn't realize he's being photographed and so I think there's something really poetic and a little romantic. It might be just me but about this image with this ethereal worker finally realizing and staring back at you. The Pullman worker trapped in a paradise not really designed for him. Jake Smith is a radio producer based in Chicago. We've spent most of today's show focused on utopian communities that well quite frankly didn't work out.

But across the country there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of intentional communities that are alive and well. They come in all shapes and sizes, some closely connected to mainstream society and others much more removed. One of the most prominent of those intentional communities is twin oaks. It was founded nearly 50 years ago in Central Virginia. This community of about 100 people operates several businesses, including making hammocks and heritage seats. A few years back, we chatted with one of twin oaks's longtime residents, Keenan Dakota. He told us about the challenges in living in a community of equals. The thing about pursuing equality is it is a really hard task because the tendency of humanity seems to be towards social stratification. Keenan, I have a lot of trouble just with Ed and Peter. We're a real democracy here. No, we're not Brian's equals so it's not a problem.

So how do you make it work? Well, so what twin oaks does is everybody has to work their share, which is 42 hours a week. And you can work anywhere in the community, including childcare or washing dishes or cooking or in the businesses. It's up to the individual where their work goes. But at the end of the week you have to have done your 42 hours somewhere. Well, how do you get necessary tasks done? Or you just have this magical way of dividing labor that people do all the necessary tasks? Or does somebody have to step up and say, I'm going to sacrifice for the group right now and do something out of the hate to do? I mean, there are two answers to that. I mean, one is twin oaks has been going for getting on 50 years. So we are fairly successful at getting the task done. And what we have is we have a weekly process where there's a couple of people who do worksheets. And we'll schedule work to make sure that there's somebody taking care of the kids and somebody cooking a meal.

And so there's usually a list of people who are willing to do that work. And they will just find that it shows up on their sheet. So you don't have 50 years of unwashed dishes. Right. Well, but the other answer to that is we actually make a fairly substantial sacrifice in efficiency. Because if you have people who are doing like four or five or six different jobs in a week, they're not going to be particularly efficient in any one job. But we make enough money and get enough done so that the community is doing well. So Kenan, one of the great obsessions of Americans in their pursuit of happiness is accumulating property. We're known as ships. Yeah, we are. But you don't. Everything is collective with you. Explain exactly what is the status of well personal possessions of property of things. At two and a half, everybody has their own bedroom and anything that is in their bedroom is their own possession. But everything else is owned communally. So we have a fleet of 15 vehicles. And if I want to take a vehicle, I can go and sign one out and take it.

But I don't know that. And our bank account is also communal. And we have a big library of clothes, like a big thrift store. And I can go into any clothes I want. And then when I'm done, I can throw them back in the communal dirty laundry and I don't have to clean them. Unless you're on duty that week. Right. Do you feel that you are sort of standing outside of American history, a kind of alternative to it? Or do you feel like you've taken the best that America has to offer and sort of refined it? How would you define your relationship? Well, I mean, that's a good question. I mean, I think that American culture and American history are to continue to experiment and to try new things. And I think that what Twin Oaks is doing is doing the same thing culturally. Well, let's try this and see how it works. But Keenan, when you started or when the community started before your time, it was very much part of the counter-cultural 1960s stuff.

Well, that's not true. Not true. Okay. I'm wrong. It was a coincidence sort of that Twin Oaks started in 1967, which was the heyday of communes. But a whole bunch of, you know, hippies came to Twin Oaks and many of them were disappointed. And what they found is that the twins are very structured and very focused on hard work and not freewheeling in any of the ways that hippies were looking for. Keenan, you know there's a long history of actual utopian communities, especially in the 19th century. To what extent did Twin Oaks draw upon that in setting itself up and in the lessons it drew from other communities? Well, essentially Twin Oaks learned nothing from the historical communities except to not do things that way. Because the historical communities don't exist anymore. And for a couple of reasons, one is that they relied on a strong leader, so they weren't focused on equality at all. Maybe in theory, but in practice they weren't.

And so once you lose your strong leader in any organization, then things tend to go belly up. I did notice Keenan that you name your buildings after intentional communities, or at least there's a lot of building here. So we certainly, you know, we respect that history, but mainly as like don't let this happen to you. Right. You're really laughing at those communities by naming your buildings after them. Yeah, we only can name our buildings after communities that no longer exist. So as we build more buildings, we are hoping that more communities fail, so we have more names to choose from. Thanks so much for sharing your insights, Keenan. It's been wonderful talking with you. Thank you, Keenan. Well, thank you so much for having me. Bye-bye. In the late 1960s, American cities were plagued by pollution, crime, and crumbling infrastructure. Tens of thousands of whites fled to the suburbs, with the help of federally-backed mortgages available only to them.

But if you were poor and black, you were stuck. Black people feel rejected. They feel like they have been pushed into a corner. It's a matter of hopelessness, this frustration. This is a recording of a civil rights activist turned businessman named Floyd McKissick. His solution was to make white flight available to black citizens too, but not to the nearest suburb. McKissick wanted them to resettle in a black-built, black-owned community in rural North Carolina. It would be constructed on 5,000 acres that had once been home to 75 slaves. His name said it all, Seoul City. Here's McKissick on a CBS Evening News report in 1969, promoting his plan. In this new town, persons will be able to control their own destinies. Black people want to have the choice to live where they want to. If Black people want to live in Mount Vernon, New York, or New York City on E-67 Street, they can. And they too can live in Seoul City.

McKissick described Seoul City as an economic, as well as social experiment. To him, Utopia meant affordable housing, health care, a safe environment, and jobs that paid a living wage. All things unavailable to black citizens in American cities. But it was incredibly ambitious. I might even say Utopian. Trying to build a city from scratch is enormously daunting. This is Christopher Strain, a historian who has written about Seoul City. We spoke to him about this story a few years back. McKissick had a way of making it sound very simple, but if you think about everything that was involved, I mean, it was just an enormous, enormous undertaking. He needed to get land. He needed to secure industry to support this new city that he was planning. He needed to get people to come and live there and work there. He needed to get political backing at the national state and local levels. He needed to do a lot.

McKissick and his small team spent a year designing the town. They mapped out the industrial areas, town center, and residential areas were the pool and health center. A wide boulevard, opportunity drive, would be lined by an office complex, shopping centers, a man-made lake, a high school, bike trails and gardens. Once they finished the design, they just needed to attract investors. That's when McKissick turned to an unlikely ally, Republican President Richard Nixon. Partnering with Richard Nixon was a shocking move. McKissick was a prominent civil rights leader in head of the Congress on racial equality or core. It was part of the Black Power movement. Here's McKissick on Meet the Press in 1966. Two little bitty words in English language. One black, everybody's going to the sixth grade, knows what black means. Power, everybody's going to the sixth grade, knows what that means. And I get a letter from a professor at Harvard, says, explain, black power.

That means putting power in black people's hands. We don't have any, and we won't stop. McKissick had been an outspoken critic of Richard Nixon. But just six years later, he's spoken support of Nixon's reelection at the Republican National Convention. Now, I became a Republican primarily because I like the trust of this administration. It has started some things for it. It hasn't completed them. That's the reason we need to get out and campaign so President can stay in there for more years to get the job done. Though a stunning turn to his former allies, strain says the partnership paid off. And he in turn got support of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, which provided Seoul City a $14 million federal bond to back the project's initial development phases in the summer of 1972. With the $14 million loan guarantee from HUD, construction began. On November 9, 1973, the first shovels of dirt were turned.

North Carolina's Republican governor showed up and gave a rousing speech. Let Seoul City be a lesson for all of us that man can go as far as his dreams can take him. Next, residents black and white began to move in. People bought into this vision. The idea, at least, was very appealing. You know, this kind of integrated community where people could live and work in the same space. You know, this promise of a better life that was promoted through brochures and pamphlets drew them in. But homeowners knew they were taking a big chance. Jane Ballgroom was one of the first people to move to the town. Here she is in the new documentary film, Seoul City. Even with the ground breaking, there was a sense of fragility. We're here. The shovels are on the ground, but they're still a long way to go. There's still the enemy at the gate. The enemy she's talking about were all the locals who didn't want them there. Remember, this black run, black belt town was taking shape in the middle of heavily white rural North Carolina.

The project also caught the attention of the newly elected Senator Jesse Helms, a politician who was openly and unapologetically racist. After Helms was elected, Floyd McKissick sent him a letter congratulating him on the victory. They were in the same party after all. But Helms wrote back, thank you for your kind words. One of my first acts will be to try to close you down. Seoul City has a short but controversial history criticized by Senator Jesse Helms and others as mismanage. McKissick had no luck in befriending Jesse Helms. Helms was very critical of the entire project. He felt that it was a prime example of overblown federal spending. The Senator's actual words were that Seoul City was the most massive wasteful boondoggle anyone in that area can remember. And Helms's request, Congress spent millions investigating the project.

Reporters began looking into the finances too, but they found nothing, no malfeasance, no fraud. Nonetheless, in 1979, the Fed announced that they would no longer fund Seoul City. This was after just six years, even though it was supposed to be a 30-year project. The city had failed to reach its population in employment goals. Only 200 people had moved in, far short of the 2000 residents McKissick had projected by 1978. But Christopher Strain says other factors contributed to Seoul City's demise as well. The timing was inauspicious. In the midst of national recession, the Arab oil embargo, the stagflation of the 1970s, it was a difficult time to build a brand new city anywhere, let alone in rural Warren County. Strain points out that race was clearly a factor, not only for politicians like Jesse Helms, but for private investors.

The name evoked black power, which to some folks in the early 1970s, many folks, in fact, it had nationalistic or aggressive overtones. I think people think of wild-eyed revolutionaries when they hear that term, though I think what McKissick meant by it, and I think what many civil rights activists meant by it, was simply economic empowerment and self-determination. I'm not sure if the South was ready for Seoul City. I'm not sure if the United States was ready for Seoul City, this multi-racial, multi-cultural black-led enterprise. I don't know if the United States is ready now for such a thing. So in that sense, maybe Seoul City is utopian. The plan did not fail because there was some innate problem with the planning.

This is Harvey Gantt from the film Seoul City. He was one of the town's early architects and a resident. He later went on to become the first black mayor of Charlotte and two-time Senate candidate against Jesse Helms. A weakness was there weren't many African-American developers, even as the people at the very top, President Nixon, on down, were trying to make a case that they were very supportive. The reality is that there were not enough white investors, if the money is in the white community, that were going to put their money into a project like that. But we were driven and stayed on it because Floyd McKinsey believed so much in it, and we all wanted to pursue the dream with him. Seoul City still exists. If you pull off Interstate 85 and Warren County, you'll find a quiet, predominantly African-American community with a Baptist church, a health care facility, and about 75 houses. There's industry in Seoul City too. In the 1990s, the county converted the town's central office complex into a state prison. It's now the largest employer in the county.

Christopher Strain helped us tell that story. He's a professor of American studies at Florida Atlantic University. His newest book is The Long 60s, America, 1955 through 1973. Quick post script. Floyd McKinsey went on to become a state district court judge in North Carolina. He died in 1991 at the age of 69. He was buried in Seoul City, and his daughter still lives there. Guys, the Seoul City story tells us that a lot of people would like to get away in the 20th century for really good reasons. But that was a rare example, and they're not a lot of others that come to mind. Brian, why is that? Peter, I hate to admit defeat on the utopian front, but after listening to you and Ed, I got to concede.

There are not nearly as many efforts to build utopias in the 20th century, but I think there's some good reasons for that. For one, it was a lot harder to get away in the 20th century. We tied the nation together, transportation wise with the interstate highway system. We tied it together, communications wise with the radio and with television. And we filled out the continent. Secondly, the 20th century of nothing else is an age of individualism. We discover our personalities. We discover psychology. And, boy, do we discover consumption. And even though a lot of people still want to go off and form perfect communities, utopias, especially in the 60s and the 70s with hippocommunes, the need to give the need to support others, the need to share is overwhelmed by those individualistic. You know, Brian, I think about the final scene in Madman, for example, where Don Draper is a place to find himself and sit in cross leg above the Pacific Ocean, and suddenly a beatific smile comes across his face. And he realizes the perfect utopia that if he could just teach the world to sing in perfect harmony and drink a Coca-Cola, all would be right with the world.

I think we carry our little bits of utopia around with us in these consumer goods and also in suburbia. You know, this seems to me that in some ways the 20th century impulse toward perfection in our community was achieved in cul-de-sacs and perfectly manicured yards. Well, that's a great point, but we have to pause for a commercial right now. That's what you made for me since the day we met. That's going to do it for today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought about this week's episode.

You'll find us at backstoryredio.org or send e-mail to backstory at Virginia.edu. We're also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at backstoryredio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger. This episode of backstory was produced by Andrew Parsons, Virginia, McCarthy, Nina, Ernest, Emily Gadik, Ramona Martinez, and Andy Cubus. Jamal Milner is our technical director, Diana Williams is our digital editor, and Melissa Gismonti is our researcher. We have help from Sequoia Carillo, Emma Greg, Aiden Lee, Liz McColley, and Peyton Wall. Special thanks to Seoul City Documentary Producers Monica Barra, Ginny Richards, and Sharadal Soul for giving us permission to play excerpts from their film. Backstories produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Major support is provided by the SheaCon Foundation, the National Damien for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment, and, by History Channel, history made every day.

Brian Ballot is Professor of History at the University of Virginia, and the Dorothy Compton Professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Peter Onaf is Professor of History Emeritus at UVA, and Senior Research Fellow at Monicello. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstories distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.