The Noyes Plays

John Humphrey Noyes founded the most revolutionary of all communal experiments in the nineteenth century and in American history the Oneida Community. As the selfordained Father of his utopian followers for thirty years, Noyes collectivized labor in the Communitys industries and abolished private property on the grounds of its Mansion House at Oneida, New York. But the defrocked preacher of Christian Perfectionism went still further: not only property, but spouses, were to be held in common in t