ABSTRACT
Fifteen years elapsed between the disintegration of the Owenist experiment and the appearance of a new wave of secular communes, influenced by Charles Fourier’s Utopian socialism. Most of Robert Owen’s followers by then had ceased their reformist activities and only a few repeated their attempts to establish independent communes. Among those who had remained loyal to Owen’s doctrines were his son Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright, who had transferred their activities from Indiana to New York. There they founded the journal The Free Enquirer, which became a platform for the hundreds of local labor unions in the East between 1825 and 1837. These unions concentrated on their professional struggles and avoided political involvements, especially after the Jacksonian democracy that had left no room for such an involvement. The unions’ activities increased when the economic prosperity enticed them to fight for a bigger share in the national income. Simultaneously, new spiritual trends appeared in the eastern states. Some took the form of religious revivals with millennial expectations, others of movements that aspired to reform the prevailing ways of life, to improve educational methods, abolish slavery, achieve women’s rights, or to introduce prison reforms.
