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The Great American Saloon Series
A Perfect Tavern
A failed utopian community’s dream is fulfilled at last.
Perhaps if the inhabitants of Robert Owens’ New Harmony had spent a little more time in the Yellow Tavern, their utopian dreams might not have been such a bust.
The Yellow Tavern has been around as long as New Harmony, Ind., roughly since 1815, though it is only recently that fried brains have been added to the menu and Brooks and Dunn to the jukebox.
The saloon’s first incarnation was on Tavern Street, but that venerable establishment went up in flames in the mid-19th century. A new tavern was hurriedly built at the present location on Church Street, the town’s main drag. In the winter, when we like to visit, the tavern is crowded with mild mannered locals who push two or three tables together and commence to toss back Bud Selects and nosh on the tavern’s justly famous thin crust pizza, or, that southern Indiana favorite, lightly fried beef brains on a bun. During festival weather, New Harmony loses its tranquil atmosphere, which defeats the whole purpose of your visit, but in winter the town is the most peaceful, meditative of places, and you can see why the original settlers picked this location nearly two hundred years ago.
New Harmony was first settled by an odd German religious sect under the leadership of the prophet Johann Georg Rapp. The Harmonists were millennialists who sought an out-of-the-way place to await the End Times. They practiced celibacy and shunned tobacco, but they weren’t expected to be completely miserable. After building shelter and a meeting house, the industrious and ingenious Harmonists set about constructing a brewery, two distilleries, and the Yellow Tavern. According to historian William E. Wilson, “the Harmonist brewery produced five hundred gallons a day,” much of which was barreled and loaded onto flatboats and steamers and sold at ports up and down the river.
When a decade passed and the End Times hadn’t arrived as expected, the Harmonists dispiritedly returned to Pennsylvania, put their Indiana town up for sale, and rethought their belief system, particularly the prohibition on tobacco and sex.
New Harmony was immediately purchased, lock, stock and barrel, by Robert Owen. Owen was a Welsh industrialist and social reformer who’d made a small fortune in the cotton business by adopting the novel idea that mill workers deserved humane treatment. His fortune secure, Owen began dabbling in the dark sciences of socialism. He laid out his principles in his tract New View of Society, ideas which included a “rational deistic religion, modified free love, and abolition of private property.” Dismissed by his critics, Owen set out to put his theories into practice by creating the “world in reverse.” In order to do so he needed to find a place unsullied by the industrial revolution. Such a place was New Harmony. Arriving here in 1825, Owen proclaimed a new dawn in his “Declaration of Mental Independence”:
I now declare to you and to the world, that Man, up to this hour, has been in all parts of the earth, a slave to a Trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon his whole race. I refer to Private or Individual Property, Absurd and Irrational systems of Religion, and Marriage.
Like many social reformers, Owen was a charismatic, eloquent, and driven fellow, but completely lacking in common sense. He convinced some of the finest philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals of the day to join his utopian adventure. But while these men knew their way around libraries and laboratories, they were at a loss when it came time to planting, tilling the soil, harvesting, or any of the other necessary chores of a wilderness community. Almost no one had used a plow before. Roger Sandall notes that by one estimate nine-tenths of the membership was useless. Later, one of the New Harmony participants, Josiah Warren, would blame the failure of the community on the lack of individual sovereignty and private property.
Owen then made yet another boneheaded mistake. He placed restrictions on the brewing and drinking of ale. The one group of Owenites who actually knew how to work a plow — a group of English farmers — immediately broke off relations with the Owenites and formed their own wet community across town.
By 1827, New Harmony’s economy was in ruins, weeds covered the fields, the buildings were in disrepair, and Owen was selling off lots to private individuals and allowing free market reforms. Later that year, he left New Harmony for good.
Today, the good folks of New Harmony are a hardy, pragmatic bunch, farmers and small business owners mostly, and because of that their town has never been more prosperous. It may not be utopia, but as long as there is a Yellow Tavern, it is well worth a visit.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (31) | Leave a comment
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Conan the Grammarian| 2.12.10 @ 8:34AM
I love the phrase "dark sciences of socialism." I am going to steal that.
L. Bryan Williams| 2.12.10 @ 9:29AM
I live about 40 miles from New Harmony. It is a beautiful little town that continues to exist only due to its quirky charm. There is a fine restaurant and inn, The Red Geranium, nestled amid the old homes, and I became engaged to my wonderful wife there twenty-five years ago, on Valentines Day. Of course, we will be enjoying dinner there this Sunday. Delicious irony-celebrating twenty five years of mariage, in a very capitalist privately owned business, in a town whose 2nd founder would have none of that, well at least for others. Owen continued to be very wealthy after his failed experiment, and I believe it is his descendants that started The Red Geranium many years later.
Simon Templar| 2.12.10 @ 10:21AM
William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony,1621: Socialism came to America with the Mayflower in 1620. After a winter of starvation under the philosophy of share and share alike, the pilgrims resorted to capitalism with each colonist benefiting from the fruits of their own labor in order to promote a bountiful harvest before facing their second winter. The First Thanksgiving could easily be viewed as a celebration of the triumph of capitalism over socialism. Bradford himself wrote and chronicled every detail of this is his famous journal. Why do we have to keep going over the same ground , fighting the same ideologies, the same idiotic proposals and utopian slop with these endless dim wits like Owens?
FTM| 2.14.10 @ 10:12PM
Why? My opinion, human ignorance. Like my pappy always said, "the easy way is always mined." The most powerful force known to mankind is human ignorance.
FTM| 2.15.10 @ 12:47AM
Probably should have added arrogance to the list too. Seems to me that the social engineers like to promote the idea that they're smarter than everybody else, that's why they need to be in the position to make all the decisions.
Pingback| 2.12.10 @ 1:18PM
The American Spectator : A Perfect Tavern Video links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Petronius| 2.12.10 @ 1:18PM
It's simple Simon. market economics is not taught in either home or school. The sandbox mentality of the majority of our populace is inculcated at the kitchen tables of people whose knowledge of the dismal science is limited to 3 words; have, get, and benefit.
Chet in Texas| 2.12.10 @ 1:30PM
TO those who live in a state / district controlled by a democrat, who subscribes to, and worships at the altar of an inexperienced punk from Chicago who managed to get elected thru the sheer stupidity of the dupes who fell for his "bull-exhaust": May I suggest that you cut & paste the relevant sections of this story ( with permission, of course ), put it onto REAL PAPER, and mail it to your idiot(s) in DC.
It is too easy to hit the delete button...
True, a letter may be thrown in a trash can with close-to-equal ease, but they must open that letter first, and they must realize the seriousness of the author who takes the time to do so.
We are at war with the Socialists / Marxists / Fascists who represent us... Let them know who our enemies include...
FTM| 2.14.10 @ 10:20PM
In my humble opinion the reason that the south side of Chicage, welfare class rabble rouser got elected in the first place is because he didn't happen to be George Bush or a klinton.
Look on the much, much brighter side. President Obama along with comrads Pelosi and Reid have pretty much locked Democrats out of popular elections fior at least a generation with the exception of localities like san fransicko and places like that.
I think that we all should celebrate the advent of President Obama replacing President Carter as being the most irrelevant president in American history.
GW| 2.12.10 @ 1:39PM
Good intraspective piece. Until the end times do arrive, people will devise utopian schemes in the naive assumption a new, inventive system will provide supreme utility. What they fail to realize is human nature prevents an earthly utopia. Humans lie, they cheat, they steal, they corrupt, they murder. This is true of even the richest and 'happiest' of societies. Trying to have a centralized, planned society fails because inevitably leadership is corrupted when it becomes to powerful, ego-driven, and greedy.
ontheright| 2.12.10 @ 3:30PM
We are seeing evidence of this very thing today - failed "utopian" ideology - in the white house.
Robert Pinkerton| 2.12.10 @ 6:29PM
U T O P I A is the title of a novel by Sir Thomas More. Derivation of the title is classical Greek, with two possibilities: Either outopos (no place) or eutopos (good place).
(This analysis opens the door to two side issues which are not to be pursued here beyond naming them, though others are welcome -- with the moderator's permission? -- to do so.
A. The analysis suggests that, to a utopian, no place is a good place or vice versa.
B> It is desirable to avoid considering the EU any kind of "good" place.)
The only way to reach utopia from this World (of time, space, substance, number, measure; and real-live, thinking, feeling, bodily-functional human beings, who sometimes are capable of being all-too-human) is to smoke opia (no typo). Even then, it is only a short-stay visa with an enforced return ticket.
Evelyn| 2.13.10 @ 11:34AM
Even though Robert Owen claimed to love humanity, he apparently had little capacity to interact with humans warmly one on one. There's theory and then there's practice.
My great-great-great-great-grandfather, his six surviving children, his brother and his mother arrived in New Harmony in May of 1826--just when matters were getting really fractious and Owen was almost out of the picture. It was a Waiting-for-Godot prototype: "When Mr. Owen gets back here, everything will be better!"
Robert Owen, of course, never returned to his silly experiment. My ancestors stayed. They actually had marketable skills. As a bemused Child of Utopia, I continue to research their lives in New Harmony. On my next visit there, I'll check out the pizza.
A side note: The descendants tended to leave New Harmony. Some wound up in northern Kentucky engaged in commerce: innkeeping, harness-making, and banking.
Osamas Pajamas| 2.14.10 @ 3:12PM
On the phrase "dark sciences of socialism" I concur with Conan the Grammarian, except that we could graduate from the particular to the general and dispense with the fiction that there is anything "scientific" about socialism, by reference to the "dark arts of statism" --- which include all of its propaganda and its nasty impositions, on its intended victims as well as its alleged beneficiaries.
Pingback| 2.15.10 @ 6:39AM
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แรน | 4.22.11 @ 12:39AM
True, a letter may be thrown in a trash can with close-to-equal ease, but they must open that letter first, and they must realize the seriousness of the author who takes the time to do so.
SBO | 5.25.11 @ 12:57AM
IBCBET The descendants tended to leave New Harmony. Some wound up in northern Kentucky engaged in commerce: innkeeping, harness-making, and banking.
Puma x Alexander McQueen | 8.12.11 @ 11:10PM
is good