By Lisbet Jære.
Norwegian emigrants to America were motivated by the Harmonists, a Pietist movement that practised communal ownership, lived in celibacy, and became the wealthiest community in North America.
The great wave of emigration from Norway and other European countries to America began in the 1860s. Dirk Johannsen, professor of cultural history at the University of Oslo, is particularly interested in certain utopian communities that left as early as the beginning of the 19th century. Who were they?
“On the ‘religious’ side, these were groups that sought to build the New Jerusalem as the starting point for an age of righteousness,” Johannsen explains.
Among the best known are the Shakers, a religious community originating in England, and the Harmonists and Zoarites, religious societies founded in America by German radical Pietists. On the ‘secular’ side are early socialists, communists and anarchists, such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony Society and the Icarians.
The latter were followers of the French communist and novelist Étienne Cabet. In the novel The Voyage to Icaria he imagined a society in which people lived and worked together collectively.
The new settlements and their social experiments were well documented in newspapers in Norway and elsewhere in Europe and inspired the first Norwegian emigrants.
Learning to see the world anew
Johannsen and his researcher colleagues have studied the narrative culture that developed in the utopian communities, and he has focused particularly on the Harmonists. Across the USA there are archives and museums that have preserved everything from sermons to speeches, newspapers, agricultural manuals, poetry and fiction, diaries and letters. At the time of our interview, Johannsen is in a Shaker archive in New Hampshire.
“Narratives are absolutely central to defining what is relevant and what is background noise in a culture. They are a fantastic source for understanding how the new settlements construct and experience their world,” says Johannsen.
What these groups have in common is that they turn their gaze towards America to seek alternatives to the state, the monarchy, and the established economic models and ways of life in Europe.
Living in celibacy and with communal ownership
For the Harmonists, for example, the monarchy was the same as the seven‑headed beast in the Book of Revelation. The Harmonists were a Pietist movement of around 700 people, established in Germany at the end of the 18th century, and they emigrated to the USA in 1804. There they founded several religious communal settlements:
They interpreted the age they were living in as the final phase of world history. Since Jesus was soon to return, it made no sense to have children, and in 1807 they held a vote in which they decided to live in celibacy. That may sound bleak, but the archival material Johannsen finds suggests the opposite.
“They describe their surroundings in epic songs, in which the settlements are revealed as Solomon’s Temple, and the rich natural world, every creature and every action, heralds the return of Jesus,” he says, pointing to a text:
“Here all of creation seems renewed, as if one were already in Eden (…) Here murder‑guns never thunder, no small patch is reddened with blood, even if it were only from a little worm; in paradise there is no death (…) every little flower shall be set free; not one perished uselessly.”
“These are narratives in which they first create the new world in the form of a narrated world.”
From story to reality
The researchers view the narrative culture both as documentation of what happened and as the realisation of what they call “regimes of attention”. These are ways of telling a story that shape, direct and coordinate attention within the groups towards a particular way of experiencing, thinking and acting.
One example is the poems and songs the Harmonists composed for different occupational groups. Some worked in agriculture, others in the textile trade, and all had their own poems to guide them in their work. Every practical action simultaneously appears as part of the larger biblical plan for a new earth and a new heaven.
“In the songs, the settlement is the ever‑growing centre of the kingdom of righteousness. When they drain river plains and build factories, they are building the economy of the millennial kingdom,” says Johannsen.
And the narrated world was in fact built: the Harmonists quickly became the wealthiest community in North America.
“The settlements are still standing to this day, because they were built to such a high standard. They went to America’s frontier regions and transformed the wet river plains into an entire world built from the ground up. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about them, disregarding the fact that they were religious, because their collective way of living was so successful,” says Johannsen.
New Harmony and socialism
Do religious and secular people experience the world differently? This is one of the questions the researchers are asking. The Welsh socialist and factory owner Robert Owen, who ran the cotton mill at New Lanark in Scotland, was another person who went to America to test the experiment of living in communal ownership. He had given up on introducing socialist measures in Britain.
For him, the monarchy was not the seven‑headed beast of Revelation, but an expression of the superstition and prejudices that stood in the way of reason and human progress. In 1825 he bought Harmony, the Harmonists’ second settlement, in order to found his own secular communal society: New Harmony.
“What the Harmonists regarded as divine was, for Owen, science, and it was Owen himself who first used the word ‘secular’ in its modern sense. They built open schools, and the first experiment with a kindergarten was carried out here.
New Harmony Society lasted for only two years and has subsequently been regarded as a failed attempt. But Johannsen points out that it had an enormous influence: from here, the ideas of public schools, kindergartens and public libraries spread.
Another feature they shared with the Harmonists was that Owen and his followers were concerned with equality between men and women. For the Harmonists, God was both male and female.
Inspired the first Norwegian emigrants
Dirk Johannsen reveals the link between the first organised Norwegian emigration and the Harmonist community:
“It was Quakers and Haugeans who had heard about the Harmonist community and their successful way of life, and who hoped they might support them in their search for a new life in America. We have found letters that were exchanged between them.”
They travelled on the sailing ship Restauration from Stavanger to New York in 1825, and are known as “the Sloopers”. But there was no further contact with the Harmonists. They ended up in Illinois, where many converted to Mormonism – another group that aimed to build a New Jerusalem.
“After the first organised Norwegian emigration, there is still a village left called Norway in Illinois. And it would be another ten years before the next larger group emigrated from Norway to America,” says Johannsen.
Misinterpretation – no tyrannical leader
What does it take to create a new world? Johannsen believes that “belief” and “conviction” are not very useful categories when writing religious history.
“The strong sense of group belonging, the decision to emigrate and create a new world, and economic success have, throughout history, been interpreted as the result of a strong, tyrannical leader, hierarchy, persecution and fanatical faith. What we find in the archives, however, are narratives about a world in which an alternative social order becomes self-evident. Once the world was narrated in this way, the new social form followed by itself. No strong leader was needed to force it through.”
About the project
Title: “Religious and Secular Worldmaking: Narrative Cultures of Utopian Emigration and the Formation of Modern Regimes of Attention” (ntnu.no)
A collaborative project (FRIPRO) between the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the University of Oslo and the Norwegian Emigrant Museum, which studies narrative cultures at the intersection of cultural history, religious studies and cognitive science.
Read more about utopian emigration in the Journal of Cultural Research.
Read more about narrated worlds in this publication by Dirk Johannsen and others (bloomsburycollections.com).