IN THE RIVER OF SOLITUDE. Key words: Utopian socialism, Cabet, Considerant, Gouhenant, Texas Communes, Phalansteres, American Romantic Socialists, Icaria, La Reunion, History of Dallas, Texas Pioneers, Sabinal River, Utopia Texas
IN THE RIVER OF SOLITUDE
A meditation on the impact of Utopian Socialism in Texas
by Xuan Quen Santos
The Sabinal River valley is one of my
favorite spots in the Texas Hill Country. During early colonial times the river
was called River of Solitude (Rio de la Soledad) for its quiet natural beauty.
It was Comanche hunting land. Clear and cool water springs from the ground near
Lost Maples State Park and flows a forty-mile course all the way into Rio Frio
(Cold River). Their joint slow-moving currents swell with underground artesian
aquifers as they enter the main Rio de Las Nueces. Ancient, tall, and beautiful
bald cypress trees, called “sabinos” in Spanish, line the banks of these streams.
If you are surprised by the Spanish
names, it so happens that down here we recognize that long before Jamestown (1609)
and Plymouth (1615), the Spanish had founded in 1565 the city of San Agustin in
Florida, its Jesuit priests had established Mission Santa Maria de Ajacan in
Chesapeake Bay in 1570, Don Juan de
Oñate had crossed the Rio Grande in 1598 at El Paso del Norte, and his settlers
went on to establish the city of Santa Fe in 1610.
The Texas Hill Country is a beautiful but fragile
land that marks the southern end of the Great Plains of North America. It was
almost ruined over a century ago by later settlers that substituted the prairie
grasses. They protected a thin layer of soil that hid the limestone bedrock. The
land is slowly being returned to its original state by a new generation of
ranchers who are restoring the nature of its wilderness. They discovered a
private way to protect rare African species that are now extinct in their
places of origin. The beasts are flourishing in the Hill Country but are gone
forever in their original habitats. Those species are thriving in private
ranches only because their controlled harvest by hunting funds their survival,
as well as saving the owners. The hunting ranches of Texas are a great lesson
in stewardship of the land when property rights are promoted, defined, and
protected. It has not always been the case.
Hundreds of projects that elevated communitarianism-communism as a theological or secular religion came or were founded in the United States, some during colonial times. Their cornerstone was the elimination of property rights over resources. Historians now even include the first years of the pious Pilgrims among the first group. A few of the better known are the Shakers (Shaking Quakers), the Perfectionists of Oneida, the German Rappists, the Amana communes of Iowa, the Transcendentalists of Brook Farm in Massachusetts, and the Fruitlands experiment near Harvard. These were accompanied by secular or political projects, such as the New Harmony Owenites, Cabet´s Icarians, and Fourier´s Phalansteres. Texas was not exempt from these immigrants that promoted doing away with property rights and personal stewardship.
In the Texas early years as the new 28th State, at least three groups of socialist commune organizers came from France.
True heirs of the new religion of
reason-science without God, they were ostracized or persecuted in their country,
and suspect all over Europe. By then, their first, second and third revolutions
of terror had failed. Looking for a new place, they thought the successful American
revolution across the ocean had created better conditions for their socialist
utopias. The umbrella of freedom offered to immigrants by the U. S.
Constitution that is blind to religious or political biases gave them a chance.
They secured land to build their experiments in social engineering on the
foundations of centralized direction and communal ownership. Almost forgotten,
and without a physical trace to remind us, their path to oblivion should be a
warning to those newcomers from failed states who have similar ideas, whether
they are from California or Venezuela. They all failed, for no other reason but
their essential collectivist vision that is alien to the human spirit of
self-direction.
Words have lives of their own. Utopia is a good example. It was the name of an imaginary island idealized in a book by Tomas More in 1516. It was never meant to be a proposal for the future; its Greek roots mean “no place”. It was a socio-political satire of Tudor England where More later served as Lord High Chancellor to King Henry VIII, until his beheading. Now, utopian is an adjective that describes the vision of a perfect egalitarian state governed by pious reasoning. In a way, it follows Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God. In a different way in the XVIII and XIX centuries, it opened the floodgates to many ideologues during The Illustration who thought of it as a roadmap for planning perfect societies. It also generated an entire literary genre of fiction, which is where most of those plans are archived now. One such project was the island of Icaria.
Etienne Cabet
Voyage to Icaria was a best-selling utopian romance published in 1839 by the former communist French parliamentarian Etienne Cabet (1788-1856). He had been exiled to London in 1834 after the failure of the second French Revolution. Hiding in the library of the British Museum, he was inspired after discovering More’s Utopia. During the five years spent in England, he also befriended Robert Owen who had established New Harmony in Indiana in 1825. Ominously, the Icarian movement was born in a period of great agitation throughout Europe. Under intense persecution, the emerging socialist and communist movements went underground, took arms, or began a massive exodus to America by 1848. Hordes of newcomers began to move farther west from the Atlantic coast. At the same time, Texas had become known in Europe for offers of cheap land sold by companies that promoted commercial immigration. The Icarians came first to Texas.
Adolphe Gouhenant (1804-1871), a
follower of Cabet’s Icarian ideas, was commissioned in 1848 to travel in
advance of the colonists and secure land in Denton County, south of the Red
River. What they obtained were many separate parcels and not suitable for their
plans. It turned out to be closer to the new settlement of Dallas, then with a
population of 500, and far from the river which they wanted to use for
transportation. The commune failed to get established, Gouhenant was accused of
fraud, and gradually the 75 settlers that gave it a try moved to Illinois. But
Gouhenant caught the spirit of Texas and stayed.
He survived by hunting deer. He later began buying deer hides for processing and selling. With his profits he managed to buy twelve parcels of land in the growing town of Dallas. He set up shop as a photographer. The Icarian paradise in Texas was over.
When the famous socialist revolutionary Victor Considerant (1808-1893), of the third French Revolution everybody forgets, visited him in 1853, he found a prosperous Texan who owned a saloon, an art gallery, a photography studio, and a meeting hall that operated alternately as church, Masonic Lodge, dance hall, and a court of law. Considerant was also the advance promoter of another utopia inspired by the ideas of Charles Fourier (1772-1837). He should have learned the lesson from the Icarian experience but did not.
Fourier had been another French socialist ideologue who imagined he would bring social harmony to the world through voluntary "phalanxes" (Phalansteres). These planned agro-industrial cities were a combination of monastery and factory. More than 30 of these socialist communes were eventually established in the north-east. Considerant, already a celebrity in exile, had been Fourier’s disciple and right-hand heir. Around this time, the Texas legislature had halted the free land grants to colonization companies giving priority to the introduction of railroads. He arrived in Texas with plans to bring 200 Swiss, Belgian and French farmers to a new socialist “phalanx”. The group bought land near Dallas. They purchased a chunky promontory of land unsuitable for farming called La Reunion (The Meeting Place). It failed too and a few years later there was nobody left, including Considerant. By 1860, most settlers had gone back to Europe, some dispersed into the new country being built and the founder escaped further south. Just across downtown, south of the Trinity River, the place is now a premium shopping-office district where free enterprise is booming. It is still identified with the same name. The Texas socialist phalanstere was over.
Adolphe Gouhenant, Texas entrepreneur
As La Reunion was floundering and
discontent grew louder, Considerant managed to extricate himself from the
colony. He travelled in northern Mexico and the south Texas plains around San
Antonio. He found another location for a new project in Uvalde Canyon. There he
met people easy to deal with and more tolerant, as he reported, “Here
already we find in one place a population consisting of five different
elements: Mexican, American, German, French and Polish.” He added, “…under
the same political and legal regime…they were in fact much freer socially.” He
re-settled in San Antonio in 1856. With fresh funds from very reluctant French
and Belgian patrons of the colonization society, he was able to buy several
parcels of land along the Sabinal River totaling more than 50,000 acres to
build his last utopia. But times had changed in Europe and in Texas. Investors
sought to recover from the losses of La Reunion and his plans were nebulous at
best. After fifteen years, the project failed to materialize; its land was
gradually sold, and it was soon forgotten. Considerant went back to France.
Victor Considerant
The River of Solitude remains quiet to this day. I understand why Considerant thought it was paradise. I love the area too. During one of my wanderings through the countryside of Texas, I visited Lost Maples Park and later had a swim in the cool waters of the Sabinal as I fell out of my kayak. I ended up at a café on the main street of the tiny town that is a few miles down the river. It used to be a Masonic Lodge.
As I was enjoying my black coffee and buttermilk pie, I had the opportunity to chat with an old, old-timer who everyone seemed to know. I asked him if he had ever heard of Victor Considerant, and he clearly said no. It did not ring a bell. He also mentioned there were more rattlesnakes than sheep in the countryside, and the population had just dropped to 219 because one of his buddies had just passed. He was enjoying an order of lamb meat sliders, a specialty of the place.
I did not know where we were going with the conversation, but I asked him if he had ever heard of the French socialists. He indicated the only French people he knew lived down the Medina River, in the next valley, in Castroville. They haven’t been French for more than a century and a half. He thought they were nice and hardworking people. As to the socialists, he did not know any of them in person, but he knew of a few d*** socialists that hung around Austin. Everybody in the café had been listening and they all laughed. Austin is where the House of Representatives of Texas meets, and the town now is full of Texafornian refugees looking for a free paradise. I know what he meant. The pie was good and the coffee strong. “Don’t mess with Texas” refers not only to garbage.
I became a bit concerned as I was wearing sandals and a politically incorrect t-shirt. My red kayak was sitting outside the windows on top of my small economy car, sandwiched between two gigantic Texas edition trucks. Sam, the old timer, did not seem to care. He talked to me about the Comanches, the lost silver mine of Jim Bowie, and some bits about the history of the area. I finally had the courage to ask again as he downed the last of his lamb sliders.
I wanted to know who had named the town and why. He did not know, but he added that it had to be somebody with a sour sense of humor that left after selling the land. Laughter exploded again. He turned around to ask the other regular patrons of the Lost Maples Cafe if anybody knew. No one did. I bought a whole buttermilk pie to go after enjoying a slice of coconut. No Perrier here; just ask for Texas Spring Water.
The name of the town is Utopia.
Chris Jennings, author of “The Story of American Utopianism” (Random House, 2016) has this conclusion, which I endorse and share:
“Ultimately, the decline of American communal utopianism was less
about the defeat of one idea than it was about the triumph of another. As the
Republic surged westward, the dream of a transformed, egalitarian social order
burned off like mist under the hot rising sun of American Prosperity.”
Xuan Quen Santos
