Criminal - The Perfectionists

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

A story about religion, sex, an assassination, and silverware.  Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, members-only merch, and more. Learn more and sign up here. Listen back through our archives at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Please use discretion. In the early 19th century, an unusual number of American settlers were starting their own religions in the western and central parts of New York. It was the western frontier, and there weren't churches, and there weren't preachers, and it was really up to you. In 1823, in Palmyra, New York, a man named Joseph Smith said he had a vision. He said an angel led him to buried golden plates. He later translated what was written on the plates into the Book of Mormon. The Shakers started by Anne Lee in 1776 with just a few followers, but she had thousands by the middle of the 19th century.

The Shakers were originally known as Shaking Quakers for the way they danced in religious services. Ann Lee settled in Albany with her followers. Ann Lee believed that she was the representation on earth of a bisexual god, and her followers were committed to complete celibacy. And of course, they also made wonderful furniture, which is, I think, mostly what we know them for. But it was a completely new take on religion, but it really attracted people.

There were also religious revivals happening in the area. Festivals lasting for days, filled with, as author Susan Wells puts it, wailing, jumping, and speaking in tongues in ecstatic expressions of salvation. Not everyone approved. A minister who lived in New York called the area the burnt district. It was aflame with radical religious movements. And this was a moment in American history where the individual was the world. And Emerson said that every reading man has a draft of a new community in his pocket.

And the reason for that is that the war for independence shattered institutions and traditions and charismatic leaders filled the void with new imaginative social and religious structures. It's almost this idea of, you know, everybody, I deserve a full life. Not just a full life. Many people believe that they wanted to have an extraordinary life. Susan Wells is a historian and author of the book An Assassin in Utopia. In 1811, a man named John Humphrey Noyes was born in Brattleboro, Vermont. John Humphrey Noyes was the son of a former congressman and a red-headed mother named Polly Hayes,

whose nephew was Rutherford B. Hayes, who became president of the United States. So I think it was a moment also in American history where a lot of people were related to each other. Anyway, he grew up in a family of men that were so incredibly shy that many of them ended up marrying their cousins. And John Humphrey Noyes himself was so paralyzingly shy of women that he couldn't even be in a room with ladies, he said, with whom he was unacquainted. He would rather be in front of cannons than that. John Humphrey Noyes wrote in his diary, I could face a battery of cannon with less trepidation. His insecurity extended to his professional life. He went to school. He went to Dartmouth to study law.

But in his first court appearance, he was so shy that he was just stumbling through his... He was stumbling through his first court appearance. He left law and decided to focus on religion instead. He eventually enrolled in Yale Divinity School. There was a professor there who told him to follow your own truth, even if it takes you over Niagara Falls. And there were so many alternative, personal, individual versions of Christianity, that it was just an incredibly

fertile time. And so John Humphrey Noyes was steeped in that. Soon, John Humphrey Noyes found an answer to his lifelong sense of insecurity. He had a religious conversion and came up with his own design for his life and for his own world. He decided that he was perfect. John Humphrey Noyes said that in his study of the Bible, he'd discovered a way to be free of sin right now. He didn't have to wait to get to heaven to be perfect. He also said he, and he alone, had a special connection with God.

So it would be impossible for him to make bad or immoral choices. It was a way for him to deal with the world because, of course, nobody could judge him if he was perfect. Nobody would have anything bad to say about him. He was outcast from the Divinity School and lost his license to preach. But he kept doing it anyway. In 1834, he started a monthly newspaper called The Perfectionist. It had more than 500 subscribers. Then John Humphrey Noyes fell in love with a woman who married someone else. He was devastated. And then John

Humphrey Noyes announced that there was no such thing as marriage in heaven. He said, in a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse shall be restrained by law than why eating and drinking should be. The next year, John Humphrey Noyes married one of his followers. Harriet Holton was an heiress, and he used her money to help fund his newspaper. He and Harriet spent their honeymoon in Albany. They bought a printing press. Soon they met another couple. They were two of John Humphrey Noyes' followers, named Mary and George Cragan. One evening, John Humphrey Noyes and Mary Cragan took a

walk together. He wrote, quote, Coming to a lonely place, we sat on a rock by the roadside and talked. The temptation to go further was tremendous. John Humphrey Noyes told his wife Harriet what had happened. He wrote about the conversation in his diary. He said, My wife promptly expressed her entire sanction. It turned out Harriet had

feelings for Mary Cragen's husband, George, and George felt the same. So the four of them decided to make an arrangement. They would combine their relationships into one to make a group marriage. Mary Cragen wrote, We have formed a circle which it is not easy for the devil to break. We find this evidence that our love is of God. Soon, more people joined the group marriage. And in terms of his shyness, he created a community where there was no shyness acceptable about sexual relations.

Everybody was accessible to everybody else, and of course, especially to John Humphrey Noyes, who could have his way with any woman in the community, pretty much. The community lived in Putney, Vermont, until they were run out of town. The group marriage had been an open secret, but then Mary Cragen had John Humphrey Noyes' twins, and that was too much for their neighbors. He was charged with adultery and fornication. The group left Putney, and John Humphrey Noyes bought 23 acres of land in a place called Oneida in central New York.

When the group arrived at Oneida, there was only one log hut on the property with a single room. By the end of the year, 87 men, women, and children had moved to Oneida, and together they had built a three-story building with room to sleep 100 people. So tell me a little bit more about the principles of the Oneida community. What did he, what rule did he instill in the community? Well, there were several rules. He actually coined the term free love, but it was really not free because he controlled pretty much everything. One of the major rules

in the Oneida community is that men were not allowed to have an orgasm. So that was one of the rules. Another rule was don't talk much and don't spend the night together. So you could have an appointment, a sexual appointment with anybody because everybody in the Oneida community was married to everybody else. And if you were a man, you would extend an invitation to a female member of the community. She would be allowed to decline it unless it was an invitation from one of the older leaders of the community, in which case she was seriously pressured to accept it. But once you were engaged in that communion, he discouraged talking, he discouraged spending too much time together, leave the table while you still have an appetite, he said.

And he thought that too much talk caused impotence. And what were the other rules in terms of how the community lived? Sex aside, what type of a life was it for members of the community? Well, for many of them, it was wonderful, if you believe what they say. In terms of work, it was a very, I think, enlightened approach. Members were encouraged to rotate through different jobs. They were encouraged to play. Their work time would be interrupted by ten minutes of fiddle music and dancing. The women of Oneida didn't wear corsets. They wore pants. They cut their hair short.

Perhaps we don't look as well as your city belle, who is puffed and padded and painted, one woman said. But we are genuine, from head to toe. While men were not permitted to have orgasms, the women were. Susan Wells writes that the men, quote, prided themselves on their virtuosity. The rule against men's orgasms meant that Oneida women weren't likely to get pregnant if they didn't want to. Susan Wells says that John Humphrey Noyes believed that women were inferior to men, but he allowed them to work in the same jobs.

A woman became the editor of the community's newspaper. Another was Oneida's bookkeeper. At Oneida, people were encouraged to make work of their personal talents. One member, who was a hunter, invented his own kind of animal trap. The community built a factory to manufacture it, and they were sold all over the country. Oneida started other businesses, too. It made silk Thread and Jam. And by the 1860s, they were so prosperous that they were able to hire their neighbors, you know, 200 of them, to do a lot of their industrial and farming tasks, freeing up the members to have more fun.

At one point, John Humphrey Noyce had the idea for members of Oneida to have sex on stage. He said, John Humphrey Noyes believed sex brought Oneidans closer to God. John Humphrey Noyes made absolutely no attempt to hide it. In fact, he publicized it widely in the annual reports that he wrote and also in the newspaper, which they produced daily and they distributed to subscribers at no cost. And he believed that by informing everybody about this new model for society and for sexual relations

that he would convert the world. It was so popular and so well known that in the 1860s, more than 50,000 people came to the Oneida community to tour it. And on fine Sundays, they would host mobs of tourists with strawberries and cream and ice cream and beer. And so many people came that they had to put up signs warning people against graffiti, trampling the flowers, poking their noses into members' bedrooms, et cetera. And it was so popular that the railroad built a special spur to the Oneida community with a stop called Community. And it was a place that church groups went to, school groups went to, Susan B. Anthony went to.

It was very, very well known. So everybody also knew what they were doing there, wink, wink, but they also wanted to see it for themselves. This was one of the things that was really fascinating to me because this was taking place in Victorian America, and this was a time when Americans, we thought, were so prudish that you couldn't even say the word underwear. You would have to say inexpressibles.

So that was what was happening on the surface. But below that, there was a tremendous amount of ferment and alternative living. How far were people coming to become members of the community? I mean, were these mainly local people, or was word of this community spreading? Word of the community? I mean, were these mainly local people, or was word of this community spreading? Word of the community definitely spread across the country through their newspaper and their annual report. And a good example of a member who came from rather far afield was

Charles Julius Gatteau. Charles Julius Gatteau started writing to Oneida when he was 19. He was in school in Michigan and failing. He was unhappy. He heard about John Humphrey Noyes and his connection to God. Charles Gouteau thought he might be special too. He said that he felt drawn to Oneida by an irresistible power. Charles Gouteau had a maniacally inflated ego, and he aspired to take John Humphrey Noyes' place as leader of the community,

and he also said that he should be president of the United States. After four months of writing letters, Charles Gouteau was able to convince Oneida to let him join the community. He traveled from Michigan to New York. When he to convince Oneida to let him join the community. He traveled from Michigan to New York. When he joined the Oneida community, they immediately recognized that he was an oddball. He hated, absolutely hated physical labor. And his biggest beef with the Oneida community was that the women didn't want anything to do with him, and they called him, get out. They also had a practice called mutual criticism, which was pretty brutal.

They would criticize one of the residents in a group meeting about their behavior, about their personality, their character, as brutal as possible. And they had a lot to say about Charles Couteau, and he felt like he was being crucified. Interestingly, the only person who was not subject to mutual criticism was John Humphrey Noyes, of course, because he was perfect. Charles Couteau began to have doubts about his future at Oneida. He realized that the community would never see his connection to God

or treat him like a leader. But he decided there might still be a way for him to make a name for himself. Newspapers were like the Internet of the day, and newspapers had exploded since the 1830s. Since he started The Perfectionist, John Humphrey Noyes had expanded his newspaper business. He'd even set up a publishing office in Brooklyn, staffed by Oneida community members. Noyes wanted to distribute a daily religious paper. And Charles Gatteau copied whatever John Humphrey Noyes said. So it became Charles Gouteau's ambition also to create a theocratic daily newspaper. Even though he was in his early 20s, he had no experience as a writer or editor,

but he was determined and 100% believed that he could get this off the ground because he was in the employ of Jesus Christ and Company. And through the power of God's inspiration, he was bound to succeed. Charles Gouteau wrote, Oneida was very uncongenial to my literary ambitions and paralyzing to my brain. He decided to leave the community. On April 3, 1865, Charles Gouteau snuck away from the Oneida Mansion house. Just days later, on April 14, John Wilkes Booth entered a theater in Washington, D.C.

He stood behind the president, Abraham Lincoln, and shot him in the head. When a congressman in Ohio named James Garfield heard about the president's murder, he wrote, I can hardly think or write or speak. He said, I do not believe it is in the American character to become assassins. Sixteen years later, that congressman, James Garfield, became the second president to be assassinated. Shot by Charles Gouteau. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these Series Essentials.

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James Garfield's father died when he was still a toddler. His mother raised him and his three siblings in a log cabin in the woods. Susan Wells writes that growing up, Garfield hated working outside. He preferred books. He was very moody. He was embarrassed by the fact that he had been raised in poverty. And he was very insecure and self-conscious. He was kind of depressive,

but he really wanted to have a life, as he said, with thunder in it. When James Garfield finally started school at 17, he did well. He was a great scholar. He was a great speaker. He was just a great guy. He would slap you on the back. He was tall, beefy, and athletic, and serious, and very charming. James Garfield was so admired at his school that after he graduated from college, he came back to be its principal. He worked another job, too. At 28, Garfield was elected as Ohio's

youngest state senator. Susan Wells says he attracted attention. Well, he was, as I say, very charming, very attractive, tall. He had a big head of sandy hair. He had a big head, bright blue eyes. And he loved women, and they loved him. He did get married in 1852, but he admitted that fidelity did not come easily or naturally to him. He married a woman named Lucretia Rudolph, known as Crete to her friends. They met as classmates. They were two of the best students at the school.

He married her, but he immediately had doubts about that. And he told her that he felt that he died daily after they were married, which is a horrible thing to say. That's really bad. I mean, it really doesn't get much worse than that. In 1861, the Civil War started. James Garfield fought several battles in the war. He spent a lot of time traveling around the country. He often got sick.

He needed female companionship, and he found it in this cross-dressing union spy named Pauline Cushman. Pauline Cushman was a fake name, a reference to a famous actor, Charlotte Cushman, who was known for playing both male and female roles. Pauline dressed as different characters to spy on the Confederacy. In Louisville, she pretended to be a Southern gentleman, playing billiards and drinking brandy to collect information. In Tennessee, she dressed as a Confederate woman looking for help after she'd been run out of her home.

Undercover, Pauline Cushman was able to visit several Confederate headquarters and memorize their defense plans. But she was eventually captured and kept prisoner. When she was later freed by Union soldiers, she was very sick. James Garfield rushed to her side. She called him one of her most constant companions. It was James Garfield who convinced Abraham Lincoln to give Pauline Cushman an honorary title of Major. Months later, James Garfield was called home.

His three-year-old daughter, who was named Eliza, but they called Trott, was sick. She died in early December, 1863. Susan Wells writes that before they buried Trott, James Garfield asked a photographer to take a memorial family portrait. They didn't have many from when she was alive. In the photo, he's holding Trott in his lap, looking down at her face. After the Civil War ended,

James Garfield worked as a lawyer. He and Lucretia had six more children, though they lost one more as a baby. He was elected and re-elected a congressman for Ohio nine times. He had another affair with a young journalist. In 1880, James Garfield was elected to the U.S. Senate, but he never had a chance to serve, because, as Susan Wells puts it,

he became the accidental nominee for president. He was at the Republican convention in 1880 as a floor manager. He was nominating somebody else, another Ohioan, for the presidency. But as James Garfield gave his speech for the other candidate, people started voting to nominate him instead. Susan Wells writes that he was stunned and tried to protest the votes, but was interrupted by cheers and people chanting his own name. There was a movement, a groundswell from the floor to draft Garfield as a dark horse candidate,

as someone everybody liked and could agree on. And that's what happened. Since he'd left Oneida, Charles Gouteau hadn't found much success in the newspaper business, or any kind of business. He'd tried for a while to be a traveling preacher. He wrote a book called The Truth, which copied all of John Humphrey Noyes' ideas. On the road, he avoided paying for hotels by claiming he worked for Jesus Christ and Company, and then running away. How does Charles Gouteau involve himself with Garfield and Garfield's campaign? Well, interestingly, the first campaign that Gouteau involved himself in

was the presidential campaign of Horace Greeley in 1872. Horace Greeley was a publishing mogul. He started the New York Tribune, and in 1872, he ran for president against Ulysses S. Grant. Charles Gouteau decided he wanted to get into politics. He obsessively wrote and revised a campaign speech for Horace Greeley. Greeley never asked for it. But his campaign did end up giving Charles Gouteau permission to give the speech at some rallies in New York City. Gouteau believed that if he worked on Greeley's presidential campaign

and Greeley went to the White House, then Guiteau was sure he would be rewarded with appointment as a foreign minister. But then Greeley lost. And he used that same template in 1880 when James Garfield ran for president. Guiteau rewrote that speech for Greeley as a speech for James Garfield with the same expectation that he would be rewarded for that campaign work

with an appointment as a foreign minister. But James Garfield had never heard of Charles Gouteau. Gouteau traveled around on his own to deliver the speech. Then James Garfield won the presidency, and Charles Gouteau went to Washington, D.C. to meet him. This was a time when the White House was open to the public. So Gouteau was in the lobby, and one day he was actually ushered into Garfield's office, and he handed

him a copy of his speech and had written on it, Minister to Paris, and left it in Garfield's hands. And Garfield must have been completely bewildered by that situation. But he was very present in the White House. The staff saw him day after day after day. What makes Gouteau want to kill James Garfield? Gouteau finally decided to remove James Garfield from the presidency because, first of all, he was disappointed that he was not being appointed as a minister to Paris. But mostly, at that moment, there was a war in the Republican Party.

The party was divided into fighting factions. And Garfield was representing one faction while Guiteau had affiliated himself with another faction. And he just believed that Garfield was standing in the way of unifying the Republican Party and that if he removed Garfield, the Republican Party would become united, and everything would be happy. So that had a lot to do with why he decided to shoot the president. Charles Gouteau bought a pistol. He had bought a bulldog revolver, which he didn't know how to use, but he practiced it on an abandoned canal in Washington. It was a small gun designed to fit into a coat pocket.

Charles Couteau chose one with an ivory handle because, as Susan Wells put it, he wanted it worthy to be preserved for history. We'll be right back. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average U.S. company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it. So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate,

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He showed up at church, the little church that Garfield attended. And Garfield was sitting there and even wrote in his diary that the service was very boring, the sermon was very boring. James Garfield wrote in his diary that the sermon was very stupid, and at one point, a dull young man with a loud voice yelled something from the back. It was Charles Gouteau. But he didn't shoot Garfield then. He decided to come back the next week. Except James Garfield wasn't planning on going to church the next Sunday. He planned to take the train to the beach with his wife.

Charles Gouteau learned about the trip. He went to the station. He was planning to shoot him there. But the First Lady had just been recovering from a horrible case of malaria, and he thought that she looked so frail and was clinging to the president's arm so tenderly that he couldn't shoot the president right there. He would have to wait and find another time. So he finally did shoot the president when he was heading off on vacation on July 2nd, 1881, and was waiting for him in the railroad station. He knew he was going to take the 930 train, and shot him twice, once grazing the elbow and once into his back. Gatteau was immediately arrested after the shooting.

He turned on his heels and walked out, and there was a police officer there who had heard the commotion, and everybody identified Gatteau as the shooter, and Gatteau totally admitted it to the officer. He said, I shot the president, and I'm going to the jail. The second shot shattered two of James Garfield's ribs, but he was still alive. To the surprise of his doctors, James Garfield stayed alive for months. The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, visited the president to see if he could use an electric device to find the bullet left in his body.

For a moment, it seemed like he might recover. But in September 1881, James Garfield died. Charles Gouteau was charged with murder. Once he's arrested and people start looking into him a little bit, how does Oneida come back into it? Oneida came back into the story during the trial, which was in November 1881. Garfield died in September. So two months later, the trial started, and the prosecution talked about

Coteau's involvement and membership in the Oneida community and pointed to that as part of the reason for his insanity. And the newspapers picked that up. By that point, it had been over 30 years since John Humphrey Noyes and his followers first moved to Oneida. Noyes controlled the community through their sex lives. And part of that power came from his own sexual charisma. And as he grew older and entered his 60s, he started to lose that. And his voice started fading. He was having horrible throat problems.

He was having physical ailments. He was getting older. He still had his way with anybody he wanted in the community, but he was just not as powerful and charismatic as he once had been. And then added to that, the second generation was coming up. And the second generation of Oneida young men had been sent to college, to Yale. And they were studying medicine and all kinds of new rational sciences. They were studying Darwin. And they came back to the community, and they did not believe

that John Humphrey Noyes was God's messenger on earth as he presented himself. So there was a rebellion of sorts, and John Humphrey Noyes began losing his grip on the community. Around the same time, a group of ministers outside Oneida were trying to get rid of John Humphrey Noyes, too. There had been a movement to destroy the community. It was led by a professor named John Mears, who was appalled at the community practices and inflamed the clergy in the area. And they could not convince the authorities to go after the Oneida community. They were too well-rooted by that time. But they gathered together on Valentine's Day in 1879 and leaked to the press false information that John Humphrey Noyes was going to be arrested. And leaders of the community were seriously alarmed by this because they were very afraid

that there was going to be all kinds of negative publicity. So they begged John Humphrey Noyes to leave and get outside the jurisdiction of New York State. So in June 1879, they hitched up a buggy, and John eventually made his way to Niagara Falls, where the Oneidans bought him a cottage called Stone Cottage, right by the edge of the falls. The Oneida community no longer believed in group marriage. But it still had its mansion house. And in 1880, it had started manufacturing silverware. So Oneida converted itself from a communal utopia to a private company. A joint stock company so that each member of the Oneida community was entitled to a certain amount of property.

And the mansion house where they lived was divided up by square feet, and even the dining room was turned into an a la carte restaurant where even pats of butter were priced by the piece. Susan Wells thinks that Charles Gouteau's trial in 1881 may have felt threatening to Oneida. The community had changed. It didn't want people looking into its past. Gouteau's old roommate from Oneida, James Vail, was called to court to testify about his character. But the night before James Vail was supposed to go to Washington, he was arrested.

There is a fire at Oneida, and he was blamed for it. And I do believe he was framed by members of the Oneida community who did not want him to reveal certain things in the federal courtroom. But I was able to find a jailhouse interview with James Vail in a very small local newspaper. And in this interview, James Vail talks about how he and his sister had been raised in the United Communities since they were very, very small children. And his sister had horrible stories about her initiation by John Humphrey Noyes and how he would take these little girls and have his way with them. And it was extremely traumatic for her. And it was

something that James Vail was just disgusted by. And I think the community members knew that and knew that he was going to talk about that on the stand during the trial. So they did what they felt they needed to do to keep him away from there. The assassination trial lasted six weeks. One of the most dramatic moments was when the prosecution passed around a piece of Garfield's spine with ribs still attached, and members of the jury just burst into tears when they handled it. At one point, Charles Gouteau argued that he didn't kill the president. His death, he said, was a case of medical malpractice.

Quote, the doctors killed Garfield. I just shot him. What was he sentenced with? He was sentenced with hanging. And it was unanimous, and it was in June 1882 that he was going to be hanged. But he was still pretty perky about it. He thought that his name would go thundering down the ages. There were tons of people at the execution. Many, many more wanted to be there, but they couldn't get tickets.

And guards were selling pieces of the coffin lining and these grisly souvenirs. Gouteau decided that he wanted to go out in grand style. So he went on to write a poem. Charles Gouteau read his poem just before his execution. He said, I am going to the Lordy. I saved my party and my land. And then he dropped the poem and yelled,

Glory, ready, go. His coffin became a tourist attraction and then his body became a tourist attraction. His lawyer, who actually was his brother-in-law, wanted to freeze the body and take it on exhibit around the country. But the Army Medical Museum took possession of his body and threw it into a bone boiler, and they cleaned the skeleton, which they were going to display in the Army Medical Museum. But they saved his head, and they stuffed it. And they stuffed it so skillfully that it still had the stubble on the beard,

marks from the rope, and it just looked like the living assassin. And they put that head in a glass jar and kept it around, and they would bring it out for curious visitors. And then eventually, Gouteau's head and face came into the possession of a showman named Professor E.M. Wirth, who took it on tour along with a monster devilfish and a transparent baby. And then eventually he installed it in his permanent museum in Indiana. And then eventually the museum burned down along with Gouteau's face. And that was the end of Charles Guiteau. I think this is one of the defining characteristics of America, certainly at that time. If you grew up in Europe, for example, or Britain, your station pretty much defined who you could be. But in America, there was this,

I think, this incredible sense of individual freedom. You could write your own book about yourself. Your life was your book. And you could make it anything that you wanted to do, as long as you really applied yourself. And that was true of John Humphrey Noyes, who created his own community, his own world. It was true of Guiteau, who was sort of the funhouse mirror version of this. He had such grandiose ideas about what he could become and who he could be that had absolutely nothing to do with his capabilities and capacity. But James Garfield also, coming from nothing, believed that he could achieve, and it was his dream to have a life with thunder in it.

And he achieved it when he became president. He certainly did. John Humphrey Noyes died in his cabin in Canada at the age of 74. Susan Wells writes, many called it depraved, but Noyes fostered for more than three decades the most successful utopian experiment in American history. Does the community still exist in any way today? The community mansion house and property is a historical site in upstate New York. And you can go visit it. You can even spend the night there, I believe. Descendants of the Oneida community still live in the house. And if you look in your kitchen drawer, you may very well have some Oneida artifacts in there. The silverware business that Oneida started in 1880 was successful.

It became a luxury product. One advertisement called Oneida silverware a gift of distinction. Community silver, it read, is a refined summons to the palate and eloquent of good taste. The company promised it would last a lifetime. Today, the flatware company still exists as the Oneida Group. Until recently, its creative director was a direct descendant of John Humphrey Noyes. The company website reads,

Perfection. The goal Oneida has strived for since it was founded almost 200 years ago. This is your dream style, made real. Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our technical director is Rob Byers.

This episode was mixed by Rick Kwan, engineering by Russ Henry. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. For more on the history of Oneida and other failed utopian communities, you might like the podcast called Nice Try, hosted by our friend Avery Truffleman. We'll have a link to it on the website. Thank you. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. the number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation. Botox Cosmetic, Adabotulinum Toxin A,

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