July 27: The Oneida Community

I'm going to use this slow apocalypse day to pick up a date I missed about a month ago. On June 25, 1950, the last member of the Oneida Perfectionist community died in upstate New York. The community was established in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes on utopian principles of communal marriage and economics, comprising about 300 members at its peak.

Noyes believed the second coming of Christ had occurred in 70 CE, and that humanity had an opportunity to realize a form of millennial perfection which it had been neglecting. This meant relinquishing all forms of ownership - including sexually exclusive relationships - and living in harmonious groups. This sort of perfection was expected to hasten Christ's return to Earth yet again.

In 1879, a breakdown in the communal marriage arrangement led to a group of Oneidans reorganizing as one of the first joint stock companies in the United States, supporting themselves by producing silverware and animal traps. The silverware business still exists today.

Two of the community's most famous members were Charles Guiteau (assassin of President James Garfield) and Leon Czolgosz (assassin of President William McKinley).