The much smaller Fruitlands experiment, established by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane in 1843, emphasized manual labor, vegetarianism, religious harmony, education, and the balanced development of the individual. However, the hardships endured by Mrs. Alcott and her children at Fruitlands caused tension between her husband and herself. Moreover, Lane's subordination of the individual to the community did not sit well with Bronson Alcott's Transcendentalism or with the needs of the Alcott family.
The only successful, industrial utopian community founded during this period was that established by John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida, New York, in 1848. The community at Oneida allowed a level of sexual freedom that many found shocking.
In their approach to utopian communities, as to all other reform movements, the Transcendentalists were clear and consistent in asserting that the individual was the key unit in the reform process. Even when they believed in the principles behind a movement, they could not support it unequivocally if it elevated the well-being of society at the expense of the development and perfection of the individual. In his "New England Reformers" (1844), Emerson declared:
. . . union must be inward, and not one of covenants, and is to be reached by a reverse of the methods [men] use. The union is only perfect, when all the uniters are isolated. . . . Each man, if he attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter the union, the smaller and the more pitiful he is. But leave him alone, to recognize in every hour and place the secret soul, he will go up and down doing the works of a true member, and, to the astonishment of all, the work will be done with concert, though no man spoke. . . . The union must be ideal in actual individualism.
This was the reason that Emerson and others did not join the experiment at Brook Farm.
