Paul M. Gaston, professor of history at the University of Virginia, is working with the Alabama Humanities Foundation, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, on producing a year-long public discussion of utopian themes in Western history and thought. Best known for his award-winning book, The New South Creed (1970), Gaston is now engaged in research on Fairhope, Alabama, the utopian community of his birth. He will inaugurate the project, “Utopia in American Life and Literature,” funded by an NEH exemplary award, on February 20, 1986 with a public lecture in Fairhope, at which time the Alabama Humanities Foundation will unveil a photographic exhibition on Fairhope’s history. The program will be repeated the following evening in Mobile, Alabama. Gaston has collected the photographs and written a fifteen-page booklet to accompany the exhibition.
The project joins one scholar’s research with the Alabama Humanities Foundation’s commitment to creative humanities programming. Published in part in his 1981 Lamar Memorial Lectures, entitled Women of Fair Hope (1984), Gaston’s work provides the public in Alabama with a local example of both the persistence of utopian thought in Western culture and the phenomenon of utopian experiment in nineteenth-century America. To place his research in its broad thematic context, fifteen library-based reading/discussion groups led by humanities scholars across the state will examine Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887, and Huxley’s Brave New World. The five-week seminars will conclude with a consideration of Women of Fair Hope. The photographic exhibition of Fairhope will be dis played in many of the libraries hosting the discussion groups.
Fairhope’s history, Gaston says, reflects “the ongoing search for a better world.” The brainchild of his grandfather, E. B. Gaston, Fairhope was founded in 1894 by midwesterners who, disappointed by the failure of Populism, turned to the “single-tax” theory of Henry George. The persistence of poverty in the rapidly expanding economy of the late nineteenth-century, George concluded, was rooted in the virtual monopoly of profits from the increasing value of land. He believed that the solution to the problem of poverty amidst plenty was to make all land common property. On a high bluff overlooking Mobile Bay, E. B. Gaston and others began a single-tax experiment that stressed “cooperative individualism,” wherein all property except land was reserved for private ownership. Fairhopers believed that this arrangement encouraged individual initiative but also prevented the abuses of private land monopoly.
Fairhope shared with other utopian communities a commitment to greater opportunities for women and an experimental approach to education. Women of Fair Hope explores the experience of three women who sought self-fulfillment in this community: Nancy Lewis, a former slave struggling to protect her squatter’s rights against the encroachments of the invading reformers; Marie Howland, a well-known feminist hoping to establish a model of domestic life that liberated women from household drudgery; and Marietta Johnson, an educational reformer whose “inorganic school” aimed at laying the groundwork for a just social order by educating the whole person.
Fairhope’s history echoes many of the major concerns of utopian thought from Plato to Thomas More to John Humphrey Noyes of Oneida: the impulse to build a more cooperative society; to curb the tendency for selfish misuse of resources; to develop an educated citizenry and wise leadership; and to remove the strictures of gender from individual self-fulfillment. It also acknowledges the tension between those themes and the individualism so fundamental to the American character. Fairhope provides a focal point on which to center discussion of timeless humanistic issues.
That, of course, is why Gaston chose to do this study. But the universality of the themes also makes it an excellent topic for public humanities programs in Alabama. Although diverted somewhat from the writing of his larger work on Fairhope, Gaston views the project as an opportunity to remind his home state of an intellectual tradition that needs public attention. “I am very pleased,” he said recently, “that the Alabama Humanities Foundation decided to explore the utopian tradition and I’m happy to help with it. I think it’s important for people in Alabama, and everywhere else, to be mindful of our historic quest for a better and more just society.”
Robert J. Norrell, assistant professor of history at Birmingham-Southern College, is the author of Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (1985) and is one of the key advisors on the "Utopian in American Life and Literature" project.
