Dear Jean P.S. Part Five of 10

  Dear Jean P.S.  Part Five of 10

March 1, 2020

How about starting a new country? Let’s! We’ll get rid of the King thing, and the religion thing, evict the natives, bring in millions of Africans to work for free, make our own laws, like only white men who own land can vote, kill those damned buffalo, throw our crap into the nearest river, and it’ll be a sweet place to call home. Easy! Want to buy a new and empty town on the Wabash River? It’s for sale! What could go wrong?

Dear Jean P.S., ten-part nonfiction conclusion to four fiction “Dear Jean” letters, Karen Chadwick’s tribute to:

David Dale, A Life by David J. McLaren, Stenlake Publisher, Ayrshire, Scotland, 2015, a truly beautiful new book rich with photos, docs, maps, all supporting Dr. McLaren’s extensive research on David Dale, 1739-1806. Dale was one of the first “Captains of Industry” at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution with his new cotton yarn mill in New Lanark, Scotland beginning in 1786. I found this book fascinating for a few reasons, here’s one.

In 1799, Dale’s oldest daughter, Anne Caroline, married Robert Owen. RO married into a pot of money. In 1825, RO purchased a town from a departing Lutheran cult in the new state of Indiana and renamed it New Harmony. RO took his passion for social engineering, six of his well-educated adult children, were joined by other dreamers, and attempted to create an intellectual communal experiment that failed two years later. RO could talk the talk; he couldn’t walk the walk. In spite of this expensive failure, RO became world famous for his radical ideas of how to shape good humans. To this day, there is a “Robert Owen Society” in Japan, for instance.

Flash forward to 1995 and my new job in New Harmony as private secretary to Jane Blaffer Owen, JBO. She married Kenneth Dale Owen, KDO, in 1941 and I worked for her when she was in her 80s. She brought great wealth to the marriage as her Blaffer/Texas roots were in Humble Oil and Texaco Oil, which morphed to Exxon. KDO was a descendant of David Dale and Robert Owen, through Richard Dale Owen. Elsewhere on this blog is their genealogy record. Wealth from the Dale/Owen legacy had evaporated by KDO’s time. Young Jane Blaffer appreciated that this suitor was not from the lazy wealthy class she grew up with and she was impressed that he had worked his way through college. That credential and his notable name sealed the deal.

This wing of the Owen family continued with the tradition of honoring David Dale. Kenneth and Jane gave the Dale name as middle name to two of their daughters. The Blaffer wealth saved an interesting portion of American history as Jane Blaffer Owen poured herself into the restoration and renovation of New Harmony for over 70 years. I helped.

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 Dear Jean P.S.  Part Five of 10

March 1, 2020

A Failed New Harmony

In the meantime, back to Robert Owen and what he was stirring up. After his father-in-law, David Dale, died in Scotland in 1806, RO started formulating his social engineering dream of a new world order and wrote a book, A New View of Society. RO denigrated his deceased father-in-law’s solid success with New Lanark Mills, pissed off many Scots who knew better — this is well researched and revealed in David J. McLaren’s new book, 2015, David Dale, A Life — and yet RO became famous for the book, the ideas, the plans. He made sure the book was distributed to every powerful person in the USA. When RO came to the USA in 1824 and gave public speeches, he quickly drew large crowds. He assumed all those people liked what he had to say and would back him financially. No. They were interested, but few wealthy people put money into RO’s elaborate and strange idea of how to manage humans sans religion.

Nevertheless, RO proceeded to the English Prairie settlement and in the Richard Flower homestead in December 1824, met with the Harmonist business manager Fredrick Rapp, who was adopted son of cult leader Fr. Rapp. Shortly they settled on a price for the town the religious cult had just built, Harmonie. Differing accounts put the cost somewhere in the $150,000 range. In January 1825 Owen became the owner of his own town and renamed it New Harmony. Some of the Harmonists had agreed to stay temporarily and help new owners learn the operation. This posed one little problem, however.

As RO gave speeches in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, he breezily encouraged people to Come to New Harmony! Be a part of this new plan! Everyone will get a share of the holdings! And yes, lots of people started arriving in New Harmony, but did they have skill to navigate long meetings about work plans? Did they have farming skills? Could they shoe a horse? Could they build a house? Could they cook for large numbers? Run a saw mill? Repair a machine? Shear a sheep? Clean a barn? Fence in a bull? Tan leather? Make bricks? Grow food? Make hard liquor or beer? Make hemp rope? Could they be trusted at all? Could they, would they, work?

Well well well. No. Hell to the no. Most of the people arriving to live in New Harmony had limited city skills, if any. Of course, it was mostly the dreamers and the landless, the people on the bottom of the European hierarchy — who else would move to the edge of nowhere on a whim? And worse, RO had no experience with people who would argue with his ideas of labor. He was spoiled by being top dog at New Lanark Mills, where no one argued with him when he gave an order. Things were very different in New Harmony. And to make matters even worse, RO departed rather quickly to supposedly find more funding, and left the organization of the dream to his son, William Owen, a young man totally unprepared for the crowds appearing daily. As offered with the land sale, some of the Harmonists stayed to help new owners learn the ropes yet soon realized the mess and departed to join their leader in Pennsylvania as they built their third USA town from ground up. In all this chaos, something interesting peeked through the junk.

One person not only liked what he heard of RO’s dream; he was rich. William Maclure, a Scot, was also completely done with any and all religion. Maclure had entertained building his life in Paris, then Spain, then the new country USA seemed most interesting. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1795 and because he was a wealthy, notable, and respected thinker, he often dined with Thomas Jefferson and other leading thinkers of the new country. Maclure was a self-taught authority on a new science, geology, and is officially the Father of American Geology. Nice cred, eh?

RO’s dream interested Maclure, and they agreed to this: Maclure would finance and take charge of the education of New Harmony children. Maclure hired a French educator, Marie Duclos Fretageot, a woman he knew and trusted from his years in Paris and Philadelphia, and they started the School of Industry in New Harmony. Get ready for a shock: RO was convinced that best for society and best for children was to remove them from family home and raise them by educators, thus instilling better civic concepts of duty, responsibility, honor, and self-reliance. Maclure’s plan morphed and continued in New Harmony long after the rest of Owen’s dream collapsed.

Children and the Legacy of David Dale

I am disturbed by a glaring aspect of RO’s idea that children grow better when not raised by parents. He had seen such children for years, the orphan employees whose unpaid labor helped him be a rich man. My four “Dear Jean” letters, 2018-19 elsewhere on this blog, go into detail about these children, they were the orphan children, aka “Boarders,” who lived at the mill and worked there from age 6 to 16. Boarders were children abandoned or turned over by defeated family to Charity Workhouses in Glasgow and Edinburgh, to live their young lives in that nightmare setting. Until, that is, the new concept of “factory” — from the word manufactory — could use little hands, so textile mill owners made arrangements to take kids “of stout body” from the workhouses to live and work at mills.

To clarify, Dale implemented this idea at his mill, son-in-law RO continued it: the Boarders got minimal food, minimal clothing, minimal place to sleep, and minimal education in exchange for their considerable labor. Upon turning 16 Boarders were free to go on with their adult lives. There were other child workers in the Mills, aka Mill Village child workers, children with a home or some equivalent, parent or parents, and they got a tiny wage for their labor and free basic education along with all the Boarders. In my “Dear Jean” letters, my children and I work at New Lanark Mills, but my kids aren’t Boarders, no! My kids had it much better. We had two rooms at the Mill Village. Dank, cold, no plumbing, moldy, but ours for some rent money. Let’s consider the Boarders.

Were the orphan children more able to face their adult future because they didn’t have the legacy of homelife to hold them back? Did RO consider orphans fortunate because they didn’t get “programming” from wicked parents? To be sure, some parents were not up to the job of proper parenting, and problems like alcoholism, frequent famine, death by many mysterious poxes, fevers, etc., was a very common problem for many Scots in the late 1700s. Family life would change by the day, death and terrible situations reshuffled the deck constantly. RO saw this for years, but those common problems did not come to his door. He married a wealthy woman, David Dale’s daughter, Anne Caroline, who had been privately educated, she had class and status. She was most likely a fine mother, had two kids in one year among others, gave their children the best upbringing possible, and with ample servants to carry the work the Owen household was most likely a cultured place to grow up. Methinks RO was a hypocrite. Did RO have his children raised by others? Of course not. He had funds to have his children privately educated by the best teachers, and even sent some abroad for further polished education. RO did not live the values he expected from others.

Are you feeling sad about child labor? Keep in mind, at that point in human civilization, most children aged 5 and up, from all but the wealthy, were commonly “apprenticed” with legal documents to area merchants, or farm work, or domestic service. Most young people started their work lives very young. This meant that the apprentice would live at merchant’s store, etc. Really. They didn’t go home at night, they were in the total — read minimal — care of their employer. Childhood was wrapped up about 5 years old, just how European culture rolled back in the day. No such thing as “teen ager.”

It’s true that after RO’s father-in-law, David Dale, died, and RO was free to truly run the mill as he thought best, over time he stopped taking the orphan children. Additionally, RO changed mill policy on Mill Village child workers, these being children of families who worked at the Mills, now they had to be 10 years old if they wanted to work in the Mills. More on this is found in McLaren’s book, David Dale, A Life, pg. 239.

We may cheer that RO stopped taking young orphan children from the charity workhouses to labor in the mills, but did he do this out of the wisdom of his heart? I suspect that the cotton gin, a new invention by American Eli Whitney in 1792, changed the workforce needs in New Lanark Mills. When that machine became commonly used a few years later, it had to make a major difference in mill operations. Despite Whitney’s poor planning for getting this smart machine out to mills and many legal fights over who could use it, and how recompense was to be handled, when the dust settled it became a game changer for the textile industry. The cotton gin - “engine” - mechanically removed the seed hulls from a ball of cotton. When this machine was put to use in the cotton mills, small children were out of work, as this simple chore of combing/carding the raw cotton was critical to the rest of the process to get that cotton fiber strand into a spool of cotton yarn. I don’t give RO kudos for some grand ethical repulsion regarding child labor.

Methinks rather, he saw profit in the machine to do the work and thus no orphan worker hassles, such as feeding hundreds three times a day, providing space for those hundreds to sleep three to a straw mat bed, 75 to a room, providing management/supervision for them, clothing them, new shoes for winter wear once a year, educating them 6 nights a week, and paying for their annual required visit with a doctor — all orphan children were Wards of the State and only on “loan” to the Mills and the State demanded annual information regarding each child’s general health — to see if the child was of “stout body” and healthy to get back to work. Of course, with RO’s new policy of “no orphan workers” it meant that young orphans remained in lock-up charity workhouses. This decision negated a portion of the New Lanark Mills sales agreement between Dale and new owners, one of which was soon-to-be son-in-law RO. New owners had agreed, in 1799, to keep caring for the orphan workers. David Dale was rolling over in his grave. RO backed out of that agreement and no one challenged it. Who would? The kids?   

     Think about this for a moment. Those kids were now stuck in the charity workhouses until they turned 16, and those places also housed the elder folks with no family to take them in, the mentally ill, and hundreds and hundreds of infants to 16 yr. old folks. Methinks living hell. It might have been a harsh existence in the mill work, but kids confined to the workhouses were much worse off. So much for RO’s compassion for better humans, eh?

Back to Maclure and his way to throw money at problems. Maclure was so respected by top intellectuals in Philadelphia, which, in 1825, was the leading USA city for power and notable connections, that when he invited several of the best thinkers to come live in New Harmony, some took his offer. Maclure financed their work, financed their living accommodations and all the rest. My earlier query, who else would move to New Harmony on a whim? Well, keep in mind Maclure paid these people to make the move.

With Maclure’s funding, respected scientists and educators started arriving to build their lives in New Harmony. In December 1825, one famous group arrived together, coming down the Ohio River in a keelboat financed by Maclure, informally referred to as the “Boatload of Knowledge.” Really. With this one vessel, Maclure fairly drained the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia of its leading thinkers. This sudden loss of scientists and educators put great strain on the Academy, it was not a happy time for those who did not want to move to the edge of civilization, nowhere Indiana. This had one interesting aspect, the change gave the remaining thinkers with the Academy freedom to formulate more rigorous protocol for scientific research.

Yet what an infusion of prestige for New Harmony! The list of who was on the boat is impressive even from this distance of time. Renowned teachers, ranking scientists, notable artists, and others caught up in the exciting dream of intellectual communal living headed west. Thirty-five passengers and ten crew launched from Pittsburgh, down the Allegheny River, west on the Ohio River, up the Wabash River to New Harmony. Sometimes the Wabash was kind.

Unfortunately, even with the arrival of respectable thinkers, the communal town collapsed under the strain of feeding, cleaning, and maintaining the dream. RO’s Plan A fell apart in 1826. The chaotic mix of people who were unaccustomed to real work, those who were not willing to take orders from others, those who were unhelpful or outright nasty to any reasonable plan that was on the table — for instance one noted thinker was a serious alcoholic and a trouble maker — all crashed together and Plan A was done. RO owned the land, sold some of it to interested buyers, gave some to his adult children in exchange for their shares in the New Lanark Mills, and New Harmony lurched forward as a “regular” town despite its fame.

I ponder this: did RO puzzle at how the Harmonist religious cult, of over 800 people, who built the town and were extremely devoted followers of Fr. Rapp, how did they make their operation just click along for many years? Yet RO’s huge plan for humans living and working together in secular organization crashed in two years? OMG!

Five of RO’s young adult children came to New Harmony and in spite of the failure, adjustments were in order. Much more of this turn of events is discussed in a fine small book, Wonder Workers on the Wabash by Janet R. Walker. Unfortunately, the cover of the book is historically inaccurate, but the contents are interesting. The Owen siblings chose to stay and build their lives as the town continued to attract worthy intellectuals who might visit, might add to the advancement of the town, might decide to stay and build their lives. Lots of hope to go around. Let’s look at some of the notables. Put your seat-belts on. Think you know “crazy?”

To be continued