How a bunch of forest-dwelling socialists got steamrolled by industry
Life at California’s Kaweah colony circa the 19th century was pretty idyllic — until the railroad came along.
(This article is the third in a 5-part series about experimental utopias.)
The largest known single-stem tree on earth is between two and three thousand years old. It’s a sequoia redwood, located in Tulare County, in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. Tourists, scientists, and oglers know it as the General Sherman tree, but for decades, residents of a local socialist colony called it by another name: the Karl Marx tree.
The colony was called Kaweah. Its leader, Burnette Haskell, was born 1857 in a small town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, moved to San Francisco, and became a radical socialist, working with the Knights of Labor and the Coast Seamen’s Union, and establishing a local chapter of the International Workingman’s Association. Haskell was also active in the Socialist Labor Party, and published his own socialist journal called Truth.
But Haskell eventually soured on trade unionism and took to the ideas of Laurence Gronlund, a Danish-born American Marxist who encouraged cooperative economics as an antidote to capitalist exploitation. “The more Capital is being accumulated in private hands, the more impossible this wage-system renders it for the producers to buy what they produce,” Gronlund wrote. It was up to workers themselves, then, to create self-sustaining systems where people can always afford both the necessities and luxuries their own labor makes possible.
Inspired by Gronlund’s ideas and eager to get back to the mountains, Haskell decided to establish a systematic society that would operate by socialist principles of equal compensation for equal labor. He and several other socialists applied for adjoining timber logging land grants deep in the Sierra Nevadas, 53 claims totaling more than 12,000 acres, nestled between three forks of the Kaweah river. Membership cost $500 (about $13,000 in today’s dollars), $100 of which was to be paid up front. The rest could be earned with communal labor.
A hard-drinking heavy smoker with a bottomless supply of charisma, Haskell had a yen for political controversy and a unique ability to stir the passions of those around him. One acquaintance described him in verse: “He with burning eloquence their ardor whets, while nervously consuming cigarettes.” Sixty-eight people eagerly followed Haskell to the remote colony site. Many of them were members of his International Workingmen’s Association, whose statement of principles read, in part:
Our motto: War to the palace, peace to the cottage, death to luxurious idleness. Our object: the reorganization of society independent of priest, king, capitalist or loafer. Our principles: every man is entitled to the full product of his own labor, and to his proportionate share of all of the natural advantages of the earth.
They arrived In 1886, guided by Marx’s overall ideology regarding capitalism and Gronlund’s more specific suggestions for how to build a cooperative. Deep into the roadless mountains, the colonists set about establishing a community of both living and labor. Their objective was to log the land in a way that was sustainable for the earth and democratic for the people. Each laborer was paid in “time-check” medallions, which represented the amount of time that they worked. Medallions could be exchanged for meals and goods made by other members; in theory, each member got back close to what he or she put in. Labor supervisors were democratically elected and could be democratically recalled.
Colonists at Kaweah sold their timber to the public and used the money to furnish their collective existence — but it wasn’t quite enough. So they started a socialist paper called The Kaweah Commonwealth, which attracted a national audience, and encouraged non-residents to join, if only in spirit, and send money. Non-resident supporters from as far away as New York were granted membership and voting rights; Laurence Gronlund himself became a member from Boston. Of the 500 members at Kaweah’s peak, 300 lived in the Sierra Nevadas while 200 lived elsewhere.
Kaweahans were deeply invested in education and culture. A visitor from the University of California reflected, “They are all, perhaps without exception, intelligent, thoughtful, earnest, readers of books and journals, alive to the great economic and social questions of the day.” The colonists came from all walks of life — many had been proletarian manual laborers, while others were artists and creative types, and still others had been bourgeois property owners reformed by the anti-capitalist ideology that was sweeping the globe. Most were American-born, but many more were from Europe.
Several residents had sought out Kaweah specifically after hearing about it through their “Bellamy clubs,” or groups dedicated to advancing the cause of utopian socialism, specifically bringing to life the ideas of socialist novelist Edward Bellamy. Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward had described a society where everyone between the ages of 21 and 45 put in equal labor, after which time they would retire. Private property had been abolished, and all labor was both essential and non-coercive. In this society, there was no more poverty or war. Kaweah gained a reputation as the closest thing to a Bellamyite utopia in real world existence.
It was by all accounts idyllic — indeed, it’s remembered as one of the more successful utopian experiments in American history. “Here shall be joy,” proclaimed Kaweahans in their literature, “music, laughter, art, science and beauty, and all things else for which poets have sung and martyrs died, and of which in the outer world we see but the palest phantoms.” The colony provided shelter free of cost to all its residents. Same went for healthcare, which was administered by a supportive nearby doctor. All children went to school, where they called their teachers by their first names and were never physically disciplined. Kaweah had a community center, a print shop, a blacksmith shop, and several other amenities. In his book California’s Utopian Colonies, Robert V. Hine writes:
At various times a band and an orchestra were rehearsing, and their evening concerts under summer stars, though interrupted by the howling of the coyotes, were appreciated not only by the colonists but by outsiders who drove up in buggies from the valley.
Kaweahans at first had no road, and no machines to build one. But they had a great need for one, since their primary source of income was timber-selling. So the moment they set up camp, they set about building a road by hand, with shovels and pickaxes. In the end, the road would come to be known as an engineering marvel. It was 18 miles long and rose over 5,000 feet in elevation from start to finish, providing the only pathway in and out of the lush forest of giant sequoias. The tallest of the bunch needed a suitably lofty name, and so became the Karl Marx tree.
The Southern Pacific Railroad took notice of the road. They also took notice of the water and the trees, and decided that the Kaweah colony’s holdings would make a great addition to their portfolio. Kaweahans, of course, were unwilling to sell, so the railroad company used its political influence to convince the federal government to create Sequoia National Park, which displaced the colonists using eminent domain in 1890. The massive corporation then proceeded to partner with the federal government, using Kaweah’s spectacular road for its own purposes, while the colonists were forced to pack up and leave.
Many tried to stay and continue to log timber on land they still believed was rightfully theirs, but they were repeatedly arrested and charged with stealing. Burnette Haskell went back to San Francisco, but attempted for the rest of his life to recover his legal claim on Kaweah. Lamenting his failure, he wrote later, “The agents of Uncle Sam could not see the monster lumber thieves in every other canyon of the Sierras, but they could see us who in good faith were trying to do honest work upon what we believed to be ours in equity.”
He died in a state of poverty and alcoholism in 1907. Before passing away, he wrote, “And is there no remedy, then for the evils that oppress the poor? And is there no surety that the day is coming when justice and right shall reign on earth? I do not know; but I believe, and I hope, and I trust.”
