John Adolphus Etzler was a first-rate utopian in an era of utopians. Throughout the middle 1800s, all kinds of prophets and projectors, as they were called, started up little communities to literally live out social ideas. If you believed in the Enlightenment ideal of progress in civilization, surely it wasn’t too hard to imagine the apotheosis of that progress: Utopia. This was an era of applied philosophy, if ever there was one. If Jeremy Bentham had proposed the Panopticon sixty years later and in America, we’d probably have seen Panopticon City somewhere in Indiana.

Etzler, though, had a crazy proposal of his own, which he immortalized in the 1833 text, The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labour, by Powers of Nature and Machinery: An Address to All Intelligent Men. The German emigre, who eventually went on to try to found a colony based on his ideas in Venezuela, imagined a green tech utopia in the days when mechanization in the form of coal power was just emerging. We’ll be reading his book on this blog over the next few weeks as I work on the chapter dedicated to it, but let’s start with it’s conclusion: a letter “To the Honorable the Senate and to the Honorable the House of Representatives of the United States, in Congress assembled.”

The substance of this book is —
1. It is proved that there are powers at the disposal of man, million times greater than all human exertions could effect hithero.
These powers are derived —
a. From wind
b. From the tide
c. From the waves of the sea, caused by wind
d. From steam, generated by heat of the sun, by means of concentrating reflectors or burning mirrors of simple contrivance

These powers, Etzler wrote, “are more than sufficient to produce a total revolution of the human race.” All of America would be “changed into one garden,” superior to whatever human hands could effect hithero.” Etc. He goes on to describe, in great detail, a world that sounds quite like the garden at the Parker Hotel in Palm Springs. i.e. heaven on Earth.

Which, actually, was a concept that permeated the air at the fringes of society in the pre-Civil War days. For Etzler hadn’t conceived of this green tech utopia in a vacuum. In fact, we can find really direct antecedents in the “Socialist” societies that flourished right around when Etzler was writing up his tract in the late 1820 and early 1830s.

Beyond the religious figures of the time, like Joseph Smith of the Latter Day saints, the key figure in the early would-be utopian communities was a man known as Robert Owen, a wealthy Brit. Owen had some success helping workers at a factory that he owned and became known as a reformer. To put his ideas into action, he purchased a 30,000 acre township from another group, the Rappites, and moved 900 people into New Harmony, Indiana in 1826. The experiment failed pretty miserably, with the whole group dissolving into petty squabling after just a couple of years.

His story is recounted in a great book called Strange Cults and Utopias of 19th-century America by John Humphrey Noyes, a leader of one of a later Utopian community. Noyes, writing in 1870, identifies the key desire of these utopian experiments as, “the enlargement of home—the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle to large corporations.”

This was of particular interest to Noyes, who enacted a very formal open marriage policy among his own flock, but it’s also an interesting lens through which to see Etzler’s work. Noyes himself remarks that these corporations were ineffective because they — like the hippies that would come after them — detrimentally focused on land, not “manufactories” as the source of their wealth.

Judging by our own experience we incline to think that this fondness for land, which has been the habit of Socialists, had much to do with our failures… Moreover the lust for land leads off into the wilderness, “out west,” or into by-places, far away from railroads and markets; whereas Socialism, if it is really ahead of civilization, ought to keep near the centers of business, and at the front of the general march of improvement… Almost any kind of a factory would be better than a farm for a Community nrusery. We find hardly a vestige of this policy in [earlier utopian] Macdonald’s collection. The saw-mill is the only form of mechanism that figures much in his reports. It is really ludicrous to see how uniformly an old saw-mill turns up in connection with each Association, and how zealously the brethren made much of it; but that is about all they attempted in the line of manufacturing. Land, land, land, was evidently regarded by them as the mother of all gain and comfort.

Honestly, this is still true of many environmental historians, who underplay the importance of producing and using energy in their analyses. And that’s one reason why Etzler is so important. He connects a lot of strains in American history — utopianism, messianism, Progress — with energy. He foresaw that energy would dramatically transform human lives long before fossil fuels made that obvious.

Image: A New Harmony house in the “Owens Addition”