Anarchy united them, but nudity tore them apart
How a splintered group of self-defined outcasts lost a battle of “nudes versus prudes”
(This article is the fourth in a 5-part series about experimental utopias.)
The trouble with Glennis, reasoned three residents of the late 19th century commune, was that it was just too rigid — the rules too numerous, the process of interpreting them too contentious. So the trio, who were among the the last remaining residents of the settlement, got into a hand-built boat in Washington’s Puget Sound, and rowed away.
The year was 1896. With twenty dollars between them, they bought a plot of land on Joe’s Bay and established there an anarchist colony, free of rules.
They called it Home.
The three men built houses for their families, and then wrote up a charter for the community. Each member would be afforded “the personal liberty to follow their own line of action no matter how it may differ from the custom of the past or present, without censure or ostracism from their neighbor.” They established a joint landholding organization and published an ad in the socialist magazine Coming Nation. The colony attracted radicals from San Francisco, New Orleans, and West Virginia. Several came from Portland, Oregon, where they had been operating an anarchist newspaper called Firebrand, and had been imprisoned for printing and mailing an obscene poem by Walt Whitman.
Home was soon was a haven for radicals. It began printing its own newspaper, the befittingly named Discontent. When Emma Goldman, an anarchist who’d gained notoriety from distributing feminist literature (and being jailed for it), visited Home, she befriended the colonists, who considered her a “jolly comrade” with “a heart so large that it embraces the whole world.” (The U.S. government, meanwhile, considered her a subversive menace.) Goldman developed a close relationship with Home resident Gertie Vose, a devout anarchist who had contributed to Firebrand and now wrote for Discontent.
Home was a quiet community of orchards and chicken coops, but nevertheless became the target of anti-anarchist hysteria that enveloped the nation. In August of 1901, a newspaper in nearby Tacoma warned readers of the allegedly seditious activities taking place there. The next month, President McKinley was assassinated by a self-proclaimed anarchist in Buffalo, New York, setting off a tidal wave of anti-anarchist sentiment, and arrests. Among them were Emma Goldman and a man named Jay Fox, who had witnessed Chicago’s Haymarket Massacre, in which several anarchists were executed, when he was a boy.
The Tacoma paper called for anarchists to be “exterminated” and “eliminated,” and set its sights on nearby Home. “Is this nest of vipers, this unclean den of infamy, to remain undisturbed?” the paper asked. “Pierce County must drive them away.”
Veterans of the Civil War who’d fought for the Union gathered in Tacoma and held a rally denouncing Home, promising to defeat the so-called rebels in their midst. Calling themselves the Loyal League of North America, they promised “to accomplish the utter annihilation of anarchists” in America. Home colonists condemned the assassination of McKinley and invited the Loyal League to come observe their nonviolent way of life, but the league refused to visit until the red flag was lowered and replaced with the stars and stripes.
Eventually the anti-anarchist frenzy subsided, but Home had been weakened by constant scrutiny from neighbors and law enforcement. In his book Utopias on Puget Sound, Charles Pierce LaWarne writes, “Most residents disclaimed the stereotype of the violent anarchist who fomented strikes, threw bombs or plotted assassinations. They opposed physical force and violence, and maintained a peaceful community… Government authorities who came to Home, including those with arrest warrants, were greeted peacably.” Still, the occasional violent anarchists would pass through, and police would take the opportunity to shake everyone down.
In 1910, anarchists bombed the Los Angeles Times building, killing twenty-one people. Two men suspected of transporting dynamite — David Caplan and Matthew Schmidt — had ties to Home. Colonists refused to speak to law enforcement on the matter, save for one: the police got Gertie Vose’s son Donald to cave, which led to the arrest and conviction of the two men. Emma Goldman was appalled at the betrayal, writing, “You will roam the Earth accursed, shunned and hated; a burden unto yourself, with the shadow of M.A. Schmidt and David Caplan ever at your heels unto the last.” It was the end of her relationship to the colony.
Donald’s rat-finking sowed division at Home. But it was nothing compared to the next conflict: the nudes versus the prudes.
In 1911, authorities arrested several Homeites who were swimming nude in Joe’s Bay, as they had done uninterrupted for years. The rat-finks in this case were other colonists, exposing a divide in the cultural attitudes of the group. The attorney for the defendants touched upon this division when he argued that “persons possessed of an enormous amount of virtue who did not like the community had better get out of it” — a line that drew applause in the courtroom. Most Home residents supported the defendants, but the plaintiffs had allies too.
Notorious anarchist Jay Fox — who had come to live at Home the year before, shortly after a stint in jail — defended the nude swimmers in an editorial in his new, nationally influential newspaper, The Agitator. “Clothing was made to protect the body, not to hide it,” he wrote. Impurity is in the eye of the beholder, he argued, and nudity is only offensive to those “steeped in a mixture of superstition and sensualism.” He concluded that anyone who “calls on the law to punish the innocent victims whose clean bodies aroused the savage instincts [of observers] is not fit company for civilized people, and should be avoided.”
At Home, the nudes-versus-prudes battle (Jay Fox’s words) devolved. Colonists ridiculed and taunted their neighbors, called the police on each other, engaged in physical scuffles, and even chopped down each other’s apple orchards in retaliation. But just as worrisome was the law enforcement attention Fox’s article brought to him and the community. Shortly after its publication, Fox was arrested and charged with the crime of advocating disrespect for the law (in this case public nudity statutes), an offense that had been elevated to a misdemeanor in the aftermath of the McKinley assassination. Fox was found guilty in 1912 and sentenced to jail. He served a short sentence and upon his release moved back to Chicago.
Home held on for a few more years after that, but the twin hardships of internal conflict and external repression led to its eventual demise. One thing that the nudes-versus -prudes debate had exposed was that, in the absence of rules, nearly anyone could join the community, even if they didn’t accept the standards of community behavior that had previously characterized its culture. And just as colonists were free to do as they pleased, so too were other colonists free to antagonize them, with no formal procedure to sort the whole thing out. It was the opposite problem that the founders had sought to escape when they rowed away from Glennis in their hand-built boat.
The children who grew up in this period and witnessed the internecine quarrels had little patience for the anarchist experimentalism of their parents. They grew up and took jobs like normal people, sold and purchased plots of land, and chose to live in harmony with the status quo. By the 1940s, Home was just a conventional rural community like any other — no special rules, but no special freedoms either.
