Communes | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Close, interdependent communities not based on family relationships, communes have a long history in the United States and continue to represent a strand of American culture and ideology that sanctions the search for a utopia of peace, love, and equality. Researcher Benjamin Zablocki defines a commune as a group of unrelated people who voluntarily elect to live together for an indefinite time period in order to achieve a sense of community that they feel is missing from mainstream American society. Most commonly associated with the hippie and flower child members of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, communes have professed a variety of reasons for existence and can be politically, religiously, or socially based and exist in both rural and urban environments. Keith Melville has observed that commune members are linked by "a refusal to share the dominant assumptions that are the ideological underpinnings of Western society." They are extremely critical of the status quo of the American consumer society in which they live, and they promote a new value system centered on peace and love, personal and sexual freedom, tolerance, and honesty. Members wish to begin living their vision of a better society away from mainstream society and enjoy the support of their fellow believers.

Communes have existed throughout world history and in the United States since its founding in the seventeenth century. Famous nineteenth-century communes such as the Oneida and Shaker settlements consisted of mostly older, middle-class idealists who strongly believed in the possibility of creating their vision of the ideal society. They shared strong religious or political convictions and were more structured than their twentieth-century counterparts. Many of the later communes would carry on their utopian mission.

The immediate predecessors of the twentieth-century communal movement were the beatniks and African-American activists who fought for social changes that the communalists would later adopt in their created society in a desire to create a new ethics for a new age. While communes promoted rural, community, and natural values in an urban, individualistic, and artificial society, popular cultural images of communes depict isolated, run-down rural farms where barely clothed hippies enjoyed economic sharing and free love while spending most of their days in a drug-induced haze. The high visibility of the countercultural movement with which communes were associated made them a large component in the national debate

over the societal effects of the growth of "sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Commune members were predominantly young, white, middle-class males; and the communes tended to be smaller, unstructured, anarchistic, and more democratically governed than their predecessors. Most twentieth-century communes were not political in nature even though they were generally sympathetic to the left and politically oriented groups such as Students for a Democratic Society and the militant poor.

Famous twentieth-century communes ranged in location from the Farm in Tennessee to Drop City in Colorado and ranged in ideology from the secular Morning Star Ranch to the religious Hare Krishna communal farm. There were also a number of short-lived communal arrangements at the many rock festivals of the period, including the famous Hog Farm at Woodstock. Communes required a strong commitment to the group and a willingness to sacrifice some individual freedom for the group's welfare. Twentieth-century communes proved to be very fragile, and most existed for only a year or two before internal disputes attributed to male chauvinism, lack of direction, and weak structure broke them apart. The communal movement has continued in relative obscurity since the 1960s and 1970s, and will thus continue to be associated with that time period and the countercultural movement.

Communes have had both positive and negative images in United States society and in popular culture. On the positive side, the nation has always professed to value the new and different, and in the late twentieth century has placed increasing emphasis on the toleration of dissent and diversity exemplified by the multicultural movement. The twentieth-century mass media favored communes as they sought the new and eccentric, good drama, and escapist entertainment. The popular media thus focused on the colorful and controversial aspects of the communal movement including its association with widespread drug use, free love, wild clothing and hair styles, and rock 'n' roll music. Communes have also met with the strong negative attitudes of many members of mainstream society who favor the status quo and disagree with the communalists' values or lifestyles. These people comprise the so-called "Establishment" from which the hippies wished to break away. Communal members have been harassed with zoning suits, refused admittance to businesses, spat at, threatened with violence, and attacked. The communal movement also experienced a backlash in the late twentieth century as many people lamented the disrespect and defiance of youth to their elders. The reactionary right wing of American politics used hippies and communalists as conveniently visible scapegoats for all the evils of modern American society. There are also communal links to certain late twentieth-century cults that have generated extremely negative publicity. These included Jim Jones's followers, who committed mass suicide at Jonestown in the 1970s; Charles Manson's murderous followers of the 1960s; the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh, who battled the FBI at Waco in the 1990s; and the Heaven's Gate cult, whose mass suicide also received widespread coverage in the 1990s. Negative associations portray commune members as social deviants who threaten established society.

While communes face the problems of decreasing population and visibility in the late twentieth-century United States, they have not disappeared from the American scene. Communes remain prevalent in the smaller cities and college towns where a hip subculture flourishes. The value system of the hippie communes that slowly faded away in the late 1970s has had a large impact on twentieth-century society. Their legacy is evident in such American cultural phenomena as an increasing awareness of environmental issues, an emphasis on the importance of health and nutrition, a rise in New Age spiritualism, and a rise in socially conscious businesses such as Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream.

Hedgepeth, William. The Alternative: Communal Life in New America. New York, Macmillan, 1970.

Melville, Keith. Communes in the Counter Culture: Origins, Theories, Styles of Life. New York, Morrow, 1972.

Miller, Timothy. The Hippies and American Values. Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

Robert, Ron E. The New Communes: Coming Together in America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Veysey, Laurence. The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter-Culture in America. New York, Harper and Row, 1973.

Zablocki, Benjamin. Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes. New York, Free Press, 1980.

Zicklin, Gilbert. Countercultural Communes: A Sociological Perspective. Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press, 1983.

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