The Socialist Roots of the Republican Party
(the Lone One finds some friends.)
I.
Horace Greeley, the founder and editor of the New York Tribune, used the power of his newspaper to help the Republican Party win the U.S. Presidency just six years after their first meeting. Greeley and the Tribune had also been instrumental in popularizing Charles Fourier’s ideas in the United States. Fourier is a now-obscure French philosopher who despised laissez-faire capitalism and promised the coming of an egalitarian Harmonic Order. Notably, there was significant overlap between Fourierist socialists and early Republicans.
Fourierist communities, or “phalanxes,” appeared across Europe and the United States throughout the 1840s. One of the most successful of these was the Wisconsin Phalanx in present-day Ripon, Wisconsin. When that Fourierist experiment ended, several members of the Wisconsin Phalanx remained in Ripon, where they helped create and name the Republican Party in 1854.
While the Wisconsin Phalanx and its members’ roles in founding the Republican Party will be the focus of what follows, these were hardly the only socialists or socialist sympathizers involved in the early history of the Republicans. Modern Republicans love to hate socialism. Yet the initial Republicans included early feminists, associates of Karl Marx, but especially followers of Fourier.
Parke Godwin, a journalist, labor organizer, and the author of A Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier, served as clerk on the platform committee at the first Republican Convention in 1856. According to the publisher George Putnam, because of this, “certain of the important planks in the platform came to be identical in expression with Godwin’s articles in Putnam’s Monthly.”[1]
The first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, never declared himself a socialist, but his Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana certainly did. Dana had previously been an editor and contributor to the Fourierist journal The Harbinger, a member of the Fourierist Brook Farm community in Massachusetts, and the managing editor of Greeley’s New York Tribune.
Charles Dana’s ties to socialism extend beyond Fourierism. Dana met Karl Marx in Cologne in November 1848, hiring him as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune. Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels ended up contributing almost five hundred articles for Greeley’s paper.[2]
Yet less than one hundred years after the Republicans first appeared, its members vilified and attacked anyone suspected of even thinking positive thoughts about socialism or Marx. Joe McCarthy, a Republican Senator from Wisconsin (born about forty miles from the Republicans’ birthplace in Ripon), did much of the vilifying. In 1954, McCarthy spoke at the Republican Party’s centennial celebration in Ripon.[3] He remembered to attack communism but neglected to mention that his political party had been founded by socialists.
While the Republicans abandoned socialism long ago, its influence continued reverberating from places like Ripon. Milwaukee, Wisconsin—about 90 miles away —had a Socialist Mayor at the same time Joe McCarthy served as a Wisconsin Senator. In fact, Milwaukee had three Socialist mayors in the twentieth century and sent the first Socialist to the U.S. House of Representatives. At the height of their power, the Milwaukee Socialists met at Brisbane Hall, named in honor of Albert Brisbane, probably the most enthusiastic Fourierist the United States ever produced.[4] Republicans and socialists both remained powerful in Wisconsin politics, but their shared heritage has largely been forgotten.
II.
Maybe the strangest part of this story is where it begins. Charles Fourier’s writings are eccentric, dense, difficult to follow, and include passages that seem more like the ravings of a lunatic than the writings of an influential philosopher. He filled pages listing the classifications of cuckolds and explaining how the coming Harmonic Order will straighten the Earth’s axis. Yet followers around the planet dedicated their lives to his system.
Charles Fourier was born in Besançon, France in 1772, the youngest child and only son of a cloth merchant.[5] His father died when Charles was only nine, and he was mostly raised by his mother and four sisters. He came of age just as the French Revolution began in 1789, and soon found himself swept up in the chaos.
After attending college in Besançon, Fourier became a merchant’s apprentice in Lyon in 1791. When Lyon became a hub of royalist counterrevolution, the revolutionary government decided to make an example of the city. On the same day Queen Marie Antoinette lost her head, the troops stationed in Lyon received a remarkable order from the government in Paris. “On the ruins of Lyon shall be raised a column attesting to posterity the crimes and punishment of the royalists of the city, with this inscription: Lyon made war on liberty. Lyon is no more.”[6] Fourier escaped with his life but not his inheritance, and soon found himself drafted into the Army of the Rhine, fighting on behalf of the people who just tried to destroy his city.
As the French Revolution gave way to the Napoleonic era, Fourier settled in Marseille and took a job as a cloth merchant. He went on business trips across Europe collecting observations for a book he was certain would change everything. “All the Earth offers today is hideous political chaos which demands the strength of a new Hercules to purge it of the social monstrosities which disfigure it.”[7]
But fear not, “This new Hercules is here,”[8] and Hercules had taken the form of Charles Fourier, a cloth merchant in Marseille. As he writes, “It is a shop-sergeant who is going to confound all the voluminous writings of the politicians and moralists, the shameful products of ancient and modern quackery.”[9] With The Theory of the Four Movements in 1808, Charles Fourier placed his discovery before the world. He would continue to publish until his death in 1837, but everything he wrote after The Theory of the Four Movements was a restatement or clarification of that strange, confounding, and occasionally inspiring book.
Fourier had a mania for making lists and enumerating everything. The Four Movements of the title are the Animal, Organic, Material, and Social Movements. Animal Movement refers to the drives and instincts of non-human animals. Organic Movement encompasses things like colors and smells. Material Movement concerns geometry, astronomy, and physics. Social Movement describes human interactions and social organization.
All four movements are connected, so a change in any one of them will alter all the others. For instance, a change in the Social Movement from the incoherent Civilizational Order toward the coherent Harmonic Order will also change smells, tastes, planetary orbits, and make dangerous animals docile. To make the transition from Civilization to Harmony, we must organize everyone into agricultural associations Fourier calls “phalanxes.” These require at least 1620 people—so two of all 810 passional types will be present, of course—sharing resources in buildings based on the floorplan of the Palace at Versailles.
Because this change in the Social Movement will transform all the other Movements, helpful animals like antilions will replace dangerous ones like lions. The now-undrinkable oceans will taste of lemonade. We “will see the North Pole under full cultivation because of the shining ring of light, or northern crown, which will appear after two centuries of combined order.”[10] Fourier predicts the Earth’s axis will straighten out, and a comet the size of Jupiter will enter the Sun’s orbit. “The intruder would form an association with Venus, Mars, Earth, and all the smaller globes between the Sun and Jupiter, creating a brilliant retinue of seven or eight satellites and, like Saturn, would produce a double equatorial ring or a double corona at both poles.”[11]
Among these wild predictions are occasional bursts of insight into society’s failures and recommendations for new ways of living. He recognized poverty as definitive proof that Civilization has failed. Fourier writes of the “shameful numbers of the poor who crowd your cities, impoverished workers deprived of jobs, harassed by creditors and bailiffs, subjected to one humiliation after another until they finally turn to begging and parade their sores, their nakedness and their starving children through your cities, which resound with their doleful laments.”[12]
Fourier saw chaos in for-profit capitalism. He also recognized that dispersed, isolated homes were an inefficient way to live. His Harmonic Order would feature three or four large ovens run by a few passionate cooks rather than hundreds of small ovens tended by mostly indifferent homemakers. There would be one good granary, not hundreds of horrible ones. People would freely organize their shared work, joyfully moving from job to job throughout the day, never forced into a single profession for life.
Fourier wasn’t trying to fix people broken by a broken world. People are fine as they are, we just need to change the world to accommodate them. Humans will grow tails in the Harmonic Order, but their basic psychology will remain unchanged. Even their worst vices will prove useful once they are properly organized. Transforming our social and productive practices will cause animals, planetary orbits, and the taste of seawater to all change, but Fourier thinks people and their passions are unchanging.
At one point he writes that in the coming Harmonic Order, household tasks will become “so much simpler that they will not require the quarter of women who are occupied with them today; if a quarter, or even a sixth, of women enjoy housework that will be more than enough. Fortunately, God was bound to act in accordance with proportion and create a number of housewives appropriate to the 70,000 years of happiness, rather than the 5,000 years of misery in which we find ourselves.”[13]
Fourier urged his readers to stop trying to fix the Civilizational Order and get busy replacing it. “Our task now is to emerge from it, rather than studying it or improving it. This is why I am always trying to persuade readers of the necessity of rejecting all half-measures and going straight to the goal by immediately founding a canton of progressive series.”[14]
In 1845, a young Karl Marx echoed Fourier’s belief that in a better world, jobs would change every few hours. “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”[15] A few years later, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels named Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen as particularly important predecessors to their work. Because of this, Fourier became a major subject of study in the Soviet Union.[16]
Marx and Engels deemed Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Owen “utopian” socialists. The class antagonisms capital creates were not developed enough for these writers to perceive the “scientific” socialism Marx and Engels later presented. This would have baffled Fourier, who thought he had made a timeless and irrefutable discovery similar to the laws of physics. His discovery is true for all times and places. Historical developments are irrelevant.
III.
Because his work presents a timeless discovery, it should be sufficient to simply share it. While the French revolutionaries forced their vision on the world by beheading the King and Queen and trying to destroy Lyon, Charles Fourier thought the best way to remake the world was to build a working prototype of a phalanx and then let everyone see how nice it is. The old world would fall, not through violence, but abandonment.
After decades of obscurity and book sales in the dozens, Fourier eventually gained not just devoted readers, but devoted disciples. As these disciples popularized his work, they often focused on the practical aspects of making a phalanx and avoided all the cosmogony, wild predictions, and especially Fourier’s support for free love and his frequent attacks on monogamous marriage.
In The Theory of the Four Movements, Fourier writes that in the seventh series—the “dawn of happiness” just before “the advent of happiness”—we will destroy all “the hypocrisy caused by marriage.”[17] People will have multiple partners and “couples only progress through amorous stages over time, having at first no title beyond that of favorite, which carries few rights with it and can be revoked if the parties are unsuitable.”[18]
Fourier was enraged when his followers only shared the most socially acceptable parts of his work. His writings present a single “discovery” that no one can break into discrete parts. Do you want a world where you can freely explore your passions and everyone has what they need? Then you’d better get used to antilions, free love, and planetary realignment.
One of Charles Fourier’s most devoted disciples came from the United States to explore the latest in European philosophy. After studying with Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel and then a brief flirtation with the Saint-Simonians, he discovered Fourier’s work and dedicated the rest of his life to spreading word of Fourier’s discovery.
This young American, Albert Brisbane, first met Charles Fourier at the offices of La Réforme Industrielle, a Fourierist newspaper in Paris. As Brisbane describes that initial encounter: “Fourier had a large gray eye, the pupil of which was so small that it seemed a mere pin-point. This gave great intensity to his look. The nose was rather aquiline, and the corners of the large mouth curved downward—the lion mouth. This, with a strong, firm chin, completed a fixed, abstract, settled expression of countenance. [. . .] The ensemble of the face expressed great intensity; and I may remark here that during the subsequent three years with Fourier I never saw him smile.”[19]
Brisbane paid Fourier for private lessons in Fourierism, and then returned to the United States an enthusiastic apostle, writing and speaking about Fourier’s work everywhere he could—calling it “Associationism” rather than “Fourierism” as he introduced it to North America. The poet Walt Whitman once described Brisbane in New York. “His step is quick, and his arms swing awkwardly, as if he were trying to knock his elbows together behind him. Albert Brisbane the Socialist; the capitalist too—an odd circumstance for a radical in New York! Somehow or other he always looks as if he were trying to think out some problem a little too hard for him.”[20]
While Whitman was unimpressed, Horace Greeley was so enamored with Brisbane’s 1840 book, Social Destiny of Man, or Association and Reorganization of Industry, that he let Brisbane print a series of front-page columns on Fourierism in the New York Tribune. Greeley and Brisbane also started publishing The Future, a Fourierist periodical mostly written by Brisbane.[21] Thanks to the Tribune’s enormous circulation, Brisbane’s newspaper columns inspired Fourierist phalanxes across the East Coast, Upper Midwest, and eventually as far south as Texas. (Although Horace Greeley never joined a Fourierist community, he donated several thousand dollars to numerous phalanxes and served as Treasurer for the Sylvania Association in present-day Greeley, Pennsylvania.[22])
The two longest-lasting phalanxes in the United States, Brook Farm (1841-1847) and the North American Phalanx (1843-1855), were located near major cities. Brook Farm was just outside of Boston, and the North American Phalanx was in New Jersey, close to New York City. Both communities had access to ample resources and markets for the goods they produced.
The third longest-lasting phalanx in the United States was nowhere near any city. The Wisconsin Phalanx (1844-1850) was in present-day Ripon, Wisconsin. Ripon did not exist when the Phalanx began. There was just an empty field, where Wisconsin Phalanx member Eugenia Wilson Mason recalled, “The roads were sometimes impassible.”[23]
Warren Chase, the first President of the Wisconsin Phalanx, was one of the many Americans who encountered Fourier through Brisbane’s columns in the Tribune. As Chase writes in his memoirs: “At this time the country was being much agitated by the discussion of Fourier’s principles of association, and the zeal with which the New York Tribune and several other papers defended the science of the new social relations, and the reorganization of society; and the glowing prospects of several societies already commenced—as they were portrayed by enthusiastic believers, who lived in, or visited them,—brought the subject before the lyceum of the little village.”[24]
Chase was active in the Franklin Lyceum in Southport (now Kenosha), Wisconsin, where members discussed the events and ideas of the day. On December 12, 1843, below an article covering Marshall Strong’s election as President of the Wisconsin Territorial Council, the Southport Telegraph announced that the Franklin Lyceum would hold a talk on Tuesday at the Village Hall to discuss, “Would the principles of Fourier, if adopted generally, tend to diminish the evils of society?”[25]
The attendees seem to have answered yes, because two weeks later, the same paper was reporting on the proceedings of the newly formed Southport Fourier Club, where “an able and appropriate address was delivered by Doctor Parnell on the subject of Association.”[26] Then the Telegraph shared the bylaws of this new club. “Its object shall be to investigate the Social System discovered by Charles Fourier.”[27] The elected officers were Lester Rounds, Theodore Newell, R.B. Waldo, and Warren Chase.
Chase was almost as idiosyncratic as Fourier. His memoirs, The Life-Line of the Lone One, or, Autobiography of the World’s Child, are written in the third person, and he refers to himself throughout as “the Lone One.” He writes, “The Lone One entered ardently and earnestly into this new system, and sought all the information he could obtain of its principles and results. Then came the taunt from the opponents to him and others, ‘Why not practice it, if you believe it is the best way to live?’ and they answered, ‘We will.’”[28]
By May of 1844, members of the Wisconsin Phalanx were already on their way to land they had purchased to precipitate the coming Harmonic Order. “On the morning of May 27—to them ever memorable—they repaired to the valley below, on the beautiful plain surrounded by hills, like an amphitheater, and one of the most beautiful spots nature has formed in Wisconsin, and then, on their own land, pitched their tents, stuck their stakes, dipped their spades; and laid the cornerstone of the town of Ceresco, as the Lone One called the place.”[29]
Legally, they were creating the Wisconsin Phalanx in the town of Ceresco, but Ceresco—named for Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture—was used interchangeably for both the town and the Phalanx. They established a post office for Ceresco, with Lester Rounds as postmaster. Rounds, an anti-slavery activist from Southport, was the only serious contender for President of the Phalanx besides Chase. In December of 1845, on the tenth ballot, Chase won the Presidency with 36 votes. Rounds received 22 votes, and eight went to various other candidates.
Warren Chase’s life leading up to this narrow victory had been a difficult one. He was born in Pittsfield, New Hampshire in 1813 to an unmarried mother. His father, who was married to someone other than Warren’s mother when Warren was conceived, died in the War of 1812. Then his mother passed away when Warren was only five, and he truly became the Lone One. “Both parents (if he had two) were gone up out of their bodies, and he was left alone in his,—fatherless, motherless, penniless, friendless, worthless, useless, and deathless.”[30]
Chase became a ward of David Fogg and his family. He was supposed to receive an education, but he mostly received abuse and chores. He was an illiterate teenager when he ran away, eventually ending up under the care of his paternal grandfather. Chase finally received an education, and according to his own memoirs, he went from illiterate to the best student in school so quickly that it amazed everyone.
He moved west, failed at a series of businesses, married Mary White, had a child, and lived in poverty in Southport. They had two more children, one of whom died as a toddler. They had another, who died as an infant. This had been the life of the “Lone One” up until the Wisconsin Phalanx.
Nineteen men and one boy traveled from Southport to break ground in Ceresco. They planted crops and began work on a sawmill. Warren Chase makes only passing reference to the destruction and displacement of the Indigenous inhabitants of this surprisingly empty area in his memoirs. The 1823 Supreme Court ruling Johnson v. Mcintosh made it law that settlers can sell each other Indigenous land and the Phalanx took full advantage. Or, as Chase blithely put it, “Uncle Sam bought the lands between the Mississippi and Lake Michigan of those who never owned them.”[31]
No matter how the land became available, by June of 1844, families were arriving. The following February, the territorial government approved the organization’s charter, and the Wisconsin Phalanx became a legal entity. In addition to the post office and sawmill, they built a school, a grist mill, blacksmith shop, and a long building that could house thirty families. The phalanx was chartered as a joint stock company, and members bought shares in the enterprise.
Although they shared labor and resources and ate at a single table, it is inaccurate to call the Wisconsin Phalanx a commune. As was normal in Fourierist communities, property was not held communally, but owned separately by individuals who worked and ate collectively. Albert Brisbane frequently emphasizes that private property would remain in phalanxes, making statements like, “In the Combined Order all individual Rights—the fundamental one of which is the Right of Property—will be sacredly respected and strictly preserved.”[32]
Membership in the Wisconsin Phalanx did not require owning stock, and every member could vote on matters that would not impact the stock’s value. On matters that would impact its value—like buying or selling land—stockholders would cast votes based on the number of shares they owned. One share meant one vote, with an additional vote for every five shares after that, but a maximum of ten votes for any individual.
Women could be stockholders, and there were women in the Phalanx with more voting power than many of the men. This degree of gender equality was unique at the time, especially considering that the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—prohibiting states from denying women the right to vote—would pass about seventy years after the Wisconsin Phalanx ended.
The sisters Charlotte and Harriot Haven came to Ceresco in September 1848. Charlotte was twenty-seven, and Harriot eighteen. As Charlotte describes a typical week, “Monday night there was a business meeting of the council; Tuesday evening there was a meeting of the Philaletheian society, various subjects were discussed and a paper read called The Gleaner. The motto of The Gleaner was ‘Let the Gleaner go forth and glean, and gather up the fragments that nothing be lost.’ On Wednesday evening a singing school was held. A dance and a social enlivened Thursday evening. There was no meeting on Friday evening. Saturday was a general meeting for reports from foremen.”[33] So many young men visited the Haven sisters to play “whist, euchre, or chess” that they sometimes “found it difficult to have any privacy whatever.”[34]
All this flirting and dancing happened in total sobriety. Ceresco was a temperance town, and the very first thing the bylaws stipulate as “punishable by reprimand or expulsion” is “using ardent spirits as a beverage.”[35]
Eugenia Wilson Mason first traveled to Ceresco in 1845 to visit her sister. In 1848, she joined the Phalanx, eventually marrying fellow member Robert Mason in 1850. In a 1906 interview, she recalled that “the common living house was very pleasant; our social times were delightful in fellowship. Not all ate at the public or common table, but all did who chose. The Phalanx quarters were all filled. They nearly always had company. People would come from a distance, some people of note, to see its workings.”[36]
One visitor to the Wisconsin Phalanx, identified only as Mr. Hine, but most likely Lucius Hine of Cincinnati, wrote a letter about his experiences in Ceresco. It was reprinted in The Harbinger, a Fourierist periodical published by Brook Farm. Hine notes the Wisconsin Phalanx’s successful agriculture and that “The Phalanx is entirely free from debt, and though but three years old, substantially independent.”[37]
He claims that the inhabitants “sufficiently appreciate the True Object of Life to induce a strict attention to every branch of improvement. If they strive for this end, they will do good to the world that cannot be fully estimated, and coming generations will bless them for this splendid moral victory, achieved by the harmonious union of mental and physical labor.”[38]
At its peak, the Wisconsin Phalanx had 180 members, with 259 throughout its history. Eventually, the excitement and enthusiasm began to dissipate and members increasingly talked about selling their shares and moving on. Warren Chase, the President and most enthusiastic member, was often absent, working on the Wisconsin State Constitution or serving as a State Senator. The California Gold Rush was underway, and there were fortunes to be made further west. Eugenia Wilson Mason recalled that “Many of the Phalanx people went to California in 49-50,” and claimed that “The spirit of speculation is what broke up the Phalanx.”
Someone referred to as “Mr. Daniels” offered a similar explanation, but instead of gold fever, it was real estate. “Mr. Daniels, a gentleman who saw the whole progress of the Wisconsin Phalanx, says the cause of its breaking up was speculation; the love of money and the want of love of Association. Their property becoming valuable, they sold it for the purpose of making money out of it.”[39]
In a June 1850 journal entry, Ripon resident Cutting Marsh advanced yet another explanation. “There Fourierism, the child of infidelity has succeeded in maintaining an existence for six years. It has been shown that a community wh[ich] discards the Chris[tian] religion, desecrates its Sabbaths by doing business on that day, running the public mills and making it a day of recreation also, cannot long hold together. It soon becomes a mere map of moral corruption too loathsome for their own endurance.”[40]
Whatever the reasons, in December 1849, members selected officers to dissolve and divide the Phalanx. In 1850 it was officially over. Ceresco soon became part of Ripon, which had been established in 1849. The large housing complex is now an apartment building across the street from Ceresco Park, but little else remains.
In October 1849, Warren Chase wrote a letter to The Spirit of the Age magazine. News of the Wisconsin Phalanx’s demise “raised a shout of joy in those who hate and despise every effort for social reform, but it is of no importance; ours is not a failure but a triumph of principles, and may if you choose be made a practical realization of the true life.”[41]
IV.
As Wisconsin went from a territory to a state, Warren Chase served as a delegate at both constitutional conventions. He introduced or supported amendements granting the vote to women and African Americans, but too few of his fellow delegates went along with him. Chase successfully added an amendment allowing married women to own property. In 1846, this was a radical move, and the people of Wisconsin voted down the first constitution partly because of Chase’s controversial amendment.
Another delegate, Marshall Strong, advocated loudly against it. A similar law existed in France, and Strong implied it was the reason “more than one-fourth of the children born in Paris are illegitimate.” He claimed that “the effect of this law upon the husband, upon the wife, upon the children, and upon all the domestic relations will be most fearful.”[42]
The Madison Argus declared that Strong would have “the honor of saving ‘our beloved Wisconsin’ from being converted into a Fourier phalanx—a playground for lunatics and idiots.”[43] He was probably quite honored. When a Fourierist group in Sheboygan, Wisconsin tried to charter their Spring Farm Phalanx in 1847, this same Marshall Strong denied the request, refusing to make Wisconsin “a breeding place for reformers.”[44]
Warren Chase’s advocacy for women’s rights is in keeping with Charles Fourier’s philosophy. Fourier is credited with first using the term “feminism,” and often makes statements like, “there is no other cause which produces such rapid social progress or decline as a change in the condition of women.”[45] Sadly, Fourier links his surprisingly progressive opposition to patriarchy with some embarrassing bursts of retrograde racism. He writes that “the Chinese and the Jews, the nations most faithful to patriarchal customs, are also the most vicious and deceitful in the world.”[46]
Warren Chase was not the only Wisconsin Phalanx member to go on record as an advocate of women’s rights. Myron Morse, who joined the Phalanx in 1848, served as its secretary, and was later present at the founding of the Republican Party, wrote a letter to The Social Revolutionist, a free love and spiritualist journal, about what he’d learned in Ceresco. He writes, “the elevation of woman to an equality with man is the natural, safe, and only exodus out of the evils consequent upon present unhappy and repugnant relations of the sexes.”[47]
Chase tried to insert property rights for married women into the next draft of the Wisconsin State Constitution but failed. In a letter from the second convention, fellow delegate Theodore Prentiss wrote, “I have no doubt this time we shall succeed. The convention differs widely in character from the other, there is not in this that wild, headlong, ultra spirit that ruled the other, but a more quiet, gentlemanly, and national disposition.”[48]
Prentiss predicted correctly. The Constitution passed and in 1848 Wisconsin became a state. As a State Senator at the inaugural session in Wisconsin’s history, Chase successfully passed a bill granting married women property rights. Marshall Strong was unable to stop him. As Chase writes, “The rights of married women to hold property, real and personal, were soon and early secured; and thus that principle, at first so odious, was secured, and the state not ruined by its adoption.”[49]
V.
The Wisconsin Phalanx may have died, but ex-members radically influenced the course of American history. In February of 1854, four years after the Wisconsin Phalanx disbanded, the battle over slavery galvanized former phalanstarians into political action. The first public action took place at the First Congregationalist Church in Ripon, whose deacon William Dunham had also been a founding member of the Wisconsin Phalanx. The church hosted a public meeting in response to the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act, where attendees decided to start a new political party if the bill should pass.
When the bill passed the Senate in March, there was a second meeting at a Ripon schoolhouse. It was determined that they would indeed start a new political party and this new party would be called the Republicans. Years later, a pair of Ripon historians compiled a list of people who attended one or both of these meetings. Exactly one quarter of the thirty-two known attendees—all men—were former members of the Wisconsin Phalanx. The Phalanx members who helped found the Republican Party were Warren Chase, Garrett Baker, William Dunham, John Limbert, Robert Mason, Myron Morse, and Jacob Woodruff.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act was a bloody disaster. Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic Senator from Illinois, introduced the Act on January 4, 1854 to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. These new territories would be made from land left unorganized when the state of Missouri was carved out of the much larger Missouri Territory back in 1820.
According to the geographic line established by the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Kansas and Nebraska should be off-limits to slavery. Under pressure from southern senators, Douglas added a specific repeal of this geographic limitation to his bill and stipulated that slavery’s legality in these new territories would be decided by popular referendum at some undetermined date. If the bill passed, Kansas and Nebraska would be open to slavery until further notice.
Beginning with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—which organized the territory that would become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—the legality or illegality of slavery was decided by congressional mandate simultaneous to the organization of any new territory. This tradition had started to come undone in the Compromise of 1850, but with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it was explicitly abandoned. The question of slavery would be ignored until some unknown later date, the Missouri Compromise would be repealed, and unless later illegalized, slavery would be legal by default.
With the failure and impotence of existing anti-slavery parties, Alvan Bovay called the schoolhouse meeting in Ripon where the Republican party was born. Jacob Woodruff, the former librarian of the Wisconsin Phalanx, was appointed to the committee of the new party, along with Bovay and three other men. (Woodruff would remain in Ripon and build an octagonal house based on plans popularized by Orson Squire Fowler, a famous phrenologist and vegetarian.)
Alvan Bovay had been a teacher and journalist in New York City, where he wrote for progressive publications like the Workingman’s Advocate and organized an industrial congress with the journalist, Fourierist, and future clerk on the Republican’s platform committee Parke Godwin. While spending time at the Tribune offices with his friend Horace Greeley, Bovay saw letters from Warren Chase extolling the beauty of Central Wisconsin and decided to go west. The Wisconsin Phalanx was dissolving when he arrived, but he bought a large portion of their land, which was soon annexed into Ripon.[50]
Bovay had been dreaming about a new party for years. At the Whig Party Convention in 1852, he had talked to Horace Greeley about the impending need for a new political party. The pair even concluded that Republican would be a great name. (It had been applied to Thomas Jefferson’s faction in the early years of the United States and had a simplicity that other third parties of the era, like the Free Soil Party, lacked.)
Although Horace Greeley was not an immediate convert to the Republican Party, once he decided to become a supporter, “the Tribune offices became the center for Republican propaganda.”[51] When John C. Frémont became the first Republican presidential candidate in 1856, the Tribune lent its support with newspaper coverage and favorable editorials. Greeley published an inexpensive Frémont biography, plus pamphlets in English, German, and Welsh. (German for the recently arrived refugees from the failed revolutions of 1848 and Welsh for the Pennsylvania coal miners.)
Frémont lost to Democrat James Buchanan, but Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, by then the most widely read newspaper in the world[52], helped make the Republicans a legitimate contender for national power in just a few years. And in the next presidential election, Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican President.
With the incredibly rapid rise of the Republicans—a party explicitly formed to slow or stop the expansion of slavery—came the secession of all but four of the slaveholding states and the American Civil War. The socialists who founded the Republican Party were soon forgotten.
[1] George Haven Putnam, Memories of a Publisher: 1865-1915 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), 13. Godwin published a series of articles in Putnam’s Monthly that were later collected in a book called Political Essays, many of which prefigured early Republican policies. Putnam has a singlular “article” in this quotation, but I took the liberty of making it “articles,” as Godwin had published several. Thomas Bender, discussing Godwin’s role at the convention, uses the plural when he writes: “The ideology of the Republican Party, whose first platform was, as we have already noted, drafted by Godwin, using much of the very language of his Putnam’s articles.” See, Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City From 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 167.
[2] Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), 295. See also, Carl J. Guarneri, Lincoln’s Informer: Charles A Dana and the Inside Story of the Union War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019), 21-22, and Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 337.
[3] “McCarthy Raps Symington in Major Address Here,” The Ripon Commonwealth, June 10, 1954.
[4] Chris Foran, “Our Back Pages: Bucks build on old Socialist site,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, June 13, 2016.
[5] Most of the following biographical information comes from Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1986). The information was checked against other sources, but most of these seem to rely on Beecher’s excellent work.
[6] R.R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution (1941: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 156.
[7] Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements (1808: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 104.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 105.
[10] Ibid., 33-4.
[11] Ibid., 55.
[12] Ibid., 280.
[13] Ibid., 73.
[14] Ibid., 272.
[15] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Guilford, Connecticut: Prometheus Books, 1998), 53.
[16] David Riazonov, the first director of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, purchased many of Fourier’s letters for the Institute’s collection,[16] and Soviet scholars like I.I. Zilberfarb produced some of the most in-depth work on Fourier and Fourierism in the twentieth century. See, Jonathan Beecher and Valerii N. Fomichev, “French Socialism in Lenin’s and Stalin’s Moscow: David Riazonov and the French Archive of the Marx-Engels Institute,” The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 78, No. 1 (March 2006): 136.
[17] Charles Fourier, Four Movements, 125.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Albert Bisbane, Albert Brisbane: A Mental Biography with a Character Study by his Wife Redelia Brisbane (Boston: Arena Publishing, 1893), 185-6.
[20] Walt Whitman, “New York Dissected,” Life Illustrated, Vol. 2, No. 16 (August 16, 1856), 125. This article is unsigned, but Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari argue that Whitman is the author of the "New York Dissected" series in New York Dissected: A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of Leaves of Grass (New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936).
[21] Carl Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 32.
[22] Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, 36. Guarneri lists the Sylvania Association, the Clermont Phalanx, Brook Farm, and the North American Phalanx as Associations to whom Greeley made significant contributions. For Greeley’s role as Treasurer at the Sylvania Association, see John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870: New York: Hillary House, 1961), 233.
[23] The history of the Wisconsin Phalanx that follows comes from a combination of the Phalanx’s archives held by the Wisconsin Historical Society: Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d., Warren Chase’s memoir: Warren Chase, The Life-Line of the Lone One, or, Autobiography of the World’s Child (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1857), plus Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, and Samuel M. Pedrick, “The Wisconsin Phalanx at Ceresco,” Proceedings of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at its 50th annual meeting held Dec. 11, 1902 (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1903), John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (1870: New York: Hillary House, 1961), 411-448, as well as the contemporary newspaper and journal articles cited throughout.
[24] Warren Chase, Life-Line of the Lone One, 113.
[25] Southport Telegraph, Vol. 4, No. 24 (December 12, 1843), 2.
[26] “Meeting of the Friends of Association,” Southport Telegraph, Vol. 4, No. 26 (December 26, 1843), 2.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Warren Chase, Life-Line of the Lone One, 114.
[29] Ibid., 116.
[30] Ibid., 18-19.
[31] Warren Chase, Life-Line of the Lone One, 116.
[32] Albert Brisbane, A Concise Exposition of the Doctrine of Association, or, Plan for a Re-Organization of Society (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1844), 30.
[33] Frances Mason Allensworth, “Six Years of Communal Life,” Prepared for the Mosaic Club, Galesburg, Illinois in November 1939 in Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.
[34] Ibid.
[35] “Wisconsin Phalanx By Laws” in Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.
[36] All quotes from Eugenia Wilson Mason from Wisconsin Historical Society, Kidder, S.T., collected recollections, 1906 (Vol. 11) Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.
[37] Mr. Hine, “Wisconsin Phalanx,” The Harbinger, Vol. 5, No. 11 (August 21, 1847), 169.
[38] Ibid.
[39] John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms, 448.
[40] Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.
[41] Warren Chase, “To the Friends of Social Reform,” The Spirit of the Age (October 1, 1849), 260. In Wisconsin Phalanx (Ripon, Wis.). Records, 1844-1971, n.d.
[42] “Speech of Marshall M. Strong, February 5, 1847.” Wisconsin Historical Collections, vol. 28 (Madison, 1920), 240.
[43] Madison Argus, March 9, 1847, qtd. In Frederic L. Paxson, “A Constitution of Wisconsin, 1847,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (June 1915), 17.
[44] Gustave William Buchen, Historic Sheboygan County (1944: Sheboygan: Sheboygan County Historical Society, 1976), 318.
[45] Charles Fourier, Theory of the Four Movements, 132.
[46] Ibid., 63.
[47] Myron Morse, “The Ceresco Union,” The Social Revolutionist, Vol. 1, No. 4 (April 1856), 104.
[48] Theodore Prentiss to John Hubbard Tweedy, January 15, 1848, in Tweedy, John Hubbard, 1814-1891. Papers, 1800, 1824, 1832-1890, n.d.
[49] Warren Chase, Life-Line of the Lone One, 139.
[50] Samuel M. Pedrick, The Life of Alvan E. Bovay: Founder of the Republican Party in Ripon, Wis., March 20, 1854 (Ripon, WI: Commonwealth Printers, n.d., ca. 1950.
[51] Jeter Allen Isely, Horace Greeley and the Republican Party, 1853-1861: A Study of the New York Tribune (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 171.
[52] Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 169-70.