PARADISE LOST

...His father, a constable, carted several of the idealists off to jail...

...Wayland disdained the theoreticians of socialism, and his pragmatic view won him a devoted following among rank-and-file Americans who felt violated by the ravages of laissez-faire capitalism...

...We're temporary bro't to a temporary plot, That we've named after John Ruskin...

...I was told she had been cremated...

...My ten-year-old nephew Larry Likes had come with me, and in the middle of the night we used a flashlight to explore the upper floors...

...In August, Wayland moved his printing operation to Tennessee...

...Jerry took the proprietor to small-claims court, but when he entered the courtroom the judge and the dry-cleaner were in deep conversation...

...He was a taciturn man, and we had been married only recently...

...One old-timer even remembered my father-in-law and correctly identified him as "Fifer Butler," for his flute playing in the Ruskin Band...

...Upton Sinclair, in his novel Oil, blamed sexual promiscuity for the demise of Ruskin...

...The elderly son of one of the first forty colonists was running the operation when we arrived...

...His target was a dry-cleaning establishment across the street—East 44th Street in midtown Manhattan...

...I don't want to ride no train," she said...

...The Ruskinites, it turned out, had the same greed, ambition, pettiness, and paranoia they disdained in outsiders...

...Be on your way, man...

...But in 1912, after the Socialist Party lost another election and his paper had lost its broad appeal, the man who had confidently expected "the coming nation" to be socialist finally gave up in despair—and in the last contradiction of his fifty-eight years, he deliberately ended his own life...

...The first colonists thought their kind of commune could be run democratically, and they granted the vote to all newcomers...

...After a year in the red there, he moved it to Girard, Kansas, where in less than a decade it became the leading socialist newspaper in the nation...

...He did it for Pa...

...Francelia Butler is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut...

...These things and more she told me, shedding light on both a family and the American radical tradition...

...I don't take no truck in them things, but I am always right uneasy about shootin' squirrels...

...To resolve the growing disputes, the pioneers decided to play a trick—they put the commune into receivership so they could buy it back and start over again...

...Even forty years ago it was difficult to assemble such a wardrobe, but somehow I managed to supply her...

...She was deaf and refused to wear a hearing aid, so conversation with her was not easy...

...She was wearing a mustard-colored coat and a black straw hat trimmed with daisies...

...I didn't have to guess what had turned my husband into a vandal...

...She was one of eleven children of a Hudson River steamboat captain, and was raised mostly by her grandparents, who had been alive at the time of the American Revolution...

...Don't try to cheat the laundry owner," the judge admonished...

...And I knew he had once tried to unionize the Trib—and failed...

...You came all the way from Oklahoma on a bus...

...The owner gloated and Jerry vowed revenge...

...John Egerton (John Egerton is a free-lance writer in Nashville...

...The townspeople regarded him as a madman, but many snapped up his "bargains...

...Annie Butler spent six years with us, and in that time she often talked about her family's past...

...Double shuffle that old ruffle, Happy as you walk around...

...Each man and each woman shall have an equal vote, no matter how much or how little they have contributed...

...One such drama was Hercules, in which a socialist Hercules slays the Nemean lion of capitalism...

...Julius Wayland, a newspaper publisher from Indiana, founded the Ruskin Commune during the depression that seized the United States in President Grover Cleveland's second term...

...Van Fleet developed that," he told me...

...By the spring of 1894, circulation had reached almost 100,000...

...Flip, flop, rum-te-doddle-doo, Let your flapper rattle on th' ground...

...She carried a small cardboard suitcase...

...His latest book is "Generations: An American Family," to be published in September by the University Press of Kentucky...

...He died tragically, young, and uncelebrated...

...In 1892, certain that a financial crisis was imminent, Way-land sold all his real estate for gold...

...Grandma Annie Butler told me all this while we sat at the kitchen table afternoons in Arlington...

...For $10 I bought a bundle of copies of The Coming Nation, and he gave me a handful of lead type and an old pair of leather suspenders...

...The paper drew from the works of Karl Marx and the English critic John Ruskin, and it served as a vehicle by which Wayland could realize one of his dreams...

...A photographer took pictures, speeches resonated with hope, and a chorus sang "One Hundred Years from Now...

...I invited her in...

...With the help of some local children I found Larry deep inside the cave, beyond many rooms and passageways into which he could easily have strayed...

...Then she would douse the flames with water from a large granite camp coffeepot...

...His mother, he suggested, had been influenced by Omar Khayyam's stanza, "In the fires of spring/The winter garment of repentance fling...

...I slipped out of bed to see what was going on: My husband inserted a pebble into a slingshot and aimed it through the slit at the bottom of the window...

...The comrades' experiments had failed, and, so far as I could determine, most of their children grew up to be conventional Americans...

...She was a wiry little woman in her mid-eighties who had never heard of germs and didn't care much about bathing...

...What had caused Ruskin to collapse...

...I took the cloth to the cleaner across the street, who replaced it with a cotton facial towel, insisting that was what I had given him...

...In the huge main room, the children scooped up handfuls of the Fuller's earth that Isaac Broome had used to teach sculpture to the communalists...

...The difficulty came when the newcomers outnumbered the original colonists: Most late arrivals were less interested in education and more interested in religion than the original settlers, and they did not approve of the "free love" practiced by some of the trail-blazers (who issued a newspaper of their own, The Firebrand...

...One day, a small woman came to our door in Arlington...

...He regularly published his proposal: "If you will increase the circulation of The Coming Nation to 100,000 (which will come in time anyway), it will leave a surplus of about $23,000 a year...

...I searched for him in the great cave where my husband had been born, terrified that he might have fallen into its bottomless lake...

...The white linen had been stained by the orange spice...

...The Three Graces (who were quite ungraceful, Annie had said) would lead the comrades in a prophetic song, "Temporary": We're a temporary lot and we've temporary got, And we're wearin' a temporary buskin...

...The last settlers—my inlaws—left with "Ruskin," the old rat-terrier mascot...

...She said Jerry was born in a cave on a Utopian commune in Ruskin, Tennessee, where his late father had worked as a printer on the communal newspaper, The Coming Nation...

...His words and personal magnetism were responsible for the migration: Wayland had put out a call to readers of The Coming Nation to join him in building a model community ("The Co-operative Commonwealth"), and dozens—eventually hundreds—responded...

...Wayland had embraced socialism while living in Pueblo, Colorado, where he ran a printing and real-estate business...

...But the records do exist—in special collections at the University of Tennessee, in the State Library in Nashville, and in the Draper Collection at the University of Wisconsin...

...Years after Granny died, I visited Ruskin...

...Even after he gave the paper's assets to the communal association, detractors accused him of lining his pockets with profits from the publication...

...If the courts do not give justice, then one must administer justice oneself...

...At the end, Annie Butler told me, the communalists were forced to survive on fried cornmeal patties and alligator (which tasted like sweet pork...

...Women had an equal vote in communal meetings, and men took turns waiting tables or cooking with the women...

...But Granny had an amiable way of winking one brown eye at me, and she told me stories I have never forgotten...

...Wayland launched his new paper, Appeal to Reason, in Kansas City a short time later...

...She looked exhausted, so I showed her to the spare room, and she flung herself crosswise on the bed and slept for hours...

...The communalists fell short of the ideal themselves, of course: Minutes of commune meetings reveal disputes over seating arrangements, over who stole the secretary's pencil, over who was ogling whom...

...Originally, Wayland thought the commune should be named "Civilization," but he later settled on "Ruskin" because of his deep admiration for the writer...

...Children worked two hours a day, helping in the garden, lending a hand in the pressroom where The Coming Nation was printed, or assisting sculptor and communalist Isaac Broome in his cave studio...

...On the last day of the Ruskin Commune, a centenarian living in the vicinity told me, there was a drunken orgy in the cave...

...At the height of his influence, Way-land was compared favorably to Tom Paine...

...Ruskin was a Marxist without knowing it," Annie Butler told me...

...Above the main cave hung a sign: "Ruskin looks forward to a progressive future in camping and square dancing in this Southern State...

...The window was open a crack, and I could see a dark figure kneeling in front of it, his right arm pulled back...

...he died in 1900...

...Yippee...

...Son John rented me a room a block down the street from his place and son Charles brought me a cheese sandwich...

...Wayland, with $80,000 in gold packed in his trunk, traveled home to Indiana...

...For all his notoriety, though, Wayland never got his due...

...The case was never heard...

...I admired the huge walnut tree growing outside the cave...

...My mother-in-law said she once nursed a baby for a black woman who had sought refuge at the commune...

...There were Jewish members but no blacks, though blacks were often vigorously defended in the columns of The Coming Nation...

...I almost plunged to my death from the third-story nursery when the floor gave way...

...Sinclair was in a position to know...

...He introduced Eugene V. Debs to socialism and gave the five-time Presidential candidate a forum in the columns of his newspapers...

...Walter Van Fleet, the horticulturist after whom the Van Fleet rose was named, taught his fellow commune members about berries, fruit trees, and vegetables...

...I was fixin' to burn some stuff in the attic," he answered...

...Each spring, she asked me to find her a striped seersucker dress, a pair of high, black, pointed, lace shoes, grey cotton stockings, and a large blue-and-white checkered apron...

...Wayland's agents purchased a tract of land about forty miles west of Nashville, and by summer dozens of settlers had arrived...

...A fine polished slab of Ruskin marble was used for the cornerstone, and in it were placed the commune's charter and bylaws, a brief history of the commune, an anniversary number of The Coming Nation, and some Ruskin scrip...

...By 1902, all the colonists had sold their six- and eight-room houses, some for as little as ten dollars...

...The land he had bought and the printing empire he had created— in short, his principal assets—stayed in the hands of the association, yet some of Wayland's enemies accused him of skipping out on a $3,500 debt to the commu-nalists...

...he hissed...

...Something subconscious must have drawn me there—I had been offered jobs elsewhere—and almost at once I began making trips from Knoxville to the Ruskin Cave...

...The pebbles he had used for ammunition were already back on the street...

...The skillful publisher's return to prominence coincided with Ruskin's demise, and in 1899, after internal dissension had ripped the community to pieces and lawyers had walked off with the lion's share of assets, Wayland got a measure of revenge for his ouster from Ruskin...

...A police officer came running and looked about, bewildered...

...In 1963, when I was past fifty, I received a doctorate in Renaissance English and took a teaching job in Tennessee...

...He insured his house for that amount, and in 1899 it mysteriously burned down...

...The college was never completed because of internal disputes...

...On a trip abroad, I had purchased a beautiful damask Irish tablecloth and tucked it into my suitcase next to some powdered saffron...

...They was Reds and I don't have no truck with no Reds...

...But it was not until I met his mother when we moved to Arlington, Virginia, that I learned in detail of my husband's radical heritage...

...A few months later, the banks closed...

...For example, the communalists echoed Ruskin's prescient warnings about pollution by castigating the American Tobacco Company for ruining the health of youth and by criticizing industrialists for spoiling the nation's air and water...

...Julius Wayland was a man of many contradictions: a socialist with a knack for turning a profit, a believer in political action but not a party loyalist, a Utopian who lost faith in colonization schemes, a soft-hearted man with a hot temper, an idealist with pragmatic impulses...

...In 1899, the commune went into receivership...

...In the decades since, he has almost vanished from the pages of American history...

...I knew, of course, that my husband had been day city editor of The Paris Herald Tribune...

...But futile struggles are, in the end, the engines that push the wheels of history...

...But ideological fissures were already surfacing at Ruskin, and soon Wayland found himself under attack for his alleged capitalist inclinations...

...John and Annie packed up their three children— John, Annie, and Charlie—and set off for Tennessee...

...Men and women did the same work for the same pay...

...Few of the great-grandchildren even knew their ancestors conducted experiments in socialism and communism...

...In April 1893 he began publishing a socialist newspaper in Greensburg, Indiana, The Coming Nation...

...Their wives didn't want me, so I came here...

...Learning that The Coming Nation had been sold and was staggering to a final collapse, he sent a representative to buy what was left of the paper, and later merged it into the successful Kansas enterprise...

...She is the author of a novel about child abuse, "The Lucky Piece," to be published in October by Van Vactor-Goodheart, Cambridge, Massachusetts...

...I tried to introduce Annie to an old woman in the neighborhood, but she would have none of it...

...Only the newspaper remained privately owned— by Wayland—and he had promised to turn over "all the material and good will of The Coming Nation, the building and money," to the members of the community...

...When I visited Waycross and advertised in the local paper for information about Ruskin, some thirty people responded...

...I gazed at the lake: Here, my mother-in-law and her comrades had canned food for the commune and for sale to the outside world...

...The berth might snap shut and close me up against the wall...

...Granny had wanted her ashes to be scattered on the Hudson...

...But the new commune was too close to the swamp— colonists suffered from malaria—and the farming methods that had been used in Tennessee proved inappropriate in Georgia...

...At first, I was shocked...

...My nephew and I visited nearby Jewel Cave, which the communalists had used for a sightseeing business...

...As soon as she received a new outfit, she would take off the old one, put it in a paper sack, and burn it in the backyard...

...The first Tennessee-based issue of The Coming Nation appeared in August 1894...

...Early in the spring of 1897, a site was chosen for construction of the Ruskin College of New Economy .Plans were drawn up for a building that would be huge—on the order of a state capitol—and devoted to the study of noncapitalist economics...

...But when I told Jerry about the ceremonial burning, he was not surprised...

...I woke late the next morning, and Larry had disappeared...

...Her undergarments consisted of long, drop-seat underwear...

...The money will buy 3,000 acres of land and pay for it...

...But a hotel was built, and it contained living quarters for bachelors, a nursery, a 700-seat auditorium for communal meetings, and a library stocked with classics, socialist writings, and an autographed set of the complete works of Ruskin (who was old and ill by then...

...Meetings were often held in this room, I recalled, and plays were performed here...

...Jerry had never told me much about his upbringing before that day in the fall of 1940...

...Close to 100 residents lived at Ruskin by then, busily working at cooperative industries, the income from which was pooled for the benefit of all...

...I could still see its tracks in the floor...

...In 1949, Jerry died of cancer, a delayed reaction to World War I mustard-gas burns to his nasal cavity...

...During Ruskin's first winter, Way-land clung to editorial control, but that too was finally taken from him...

...That's what I learned from my father," he said...

...Eventually, Granny broke her leg, gangrene set in, and she died...

...Pa was one of them mystics and he was fixin' to come back as a squirrel, so he wanted good eatin...

...So barely a year after he had led his followers to the country Utopia, he departed in bitter disillusionment...

...Then I heard the crash of shattered glass...

...Those who send in 200 subscribers or more, or contribute as much, will be charter members, who will proceed to organize the colony on such basis of equality as in their judgment will produce justice...

...Ruskin had become a small commercial resort, owned by Joe Gibson, a swimming-pool salesman from Nashville...

...My sadness was for more than her death...

...Though John Ruskin was known primarily for his art criticism, he was also a brilliant commentator on Nineteenth Century capitalism...

...About 100 people lived at the commune in 1894...

...In the dark, he restored the V-shaped handle to my potato-masher and returned the broad rubber band to his desk...

...Brilliant, erratic, explosive, he had ricocheted across the spectrum of politics and ideology in his early adult years...

...The original commune site should not be a capitalist resort, it seems to me, but a memorial to the courageous and idealistic Americans who tried to put their ideas into practice...

...I stayed in the abandoned Ruskin Hotel, in the ground floor room where the printing press had once stood...

...But the townspeople wanted the commune destroyed: When the property went on the auction block, local citizens bought it and kicked out the residents...

...What a disappointing end to a great experiment, I thought...

...The citizens of Waycross provided some food and were generally kind to the settlers, though they were annoyed by the newcomers' attempts to introduce round dancing in square-dance country...

...Paper hung in strips from the ceilings, and wasps and bees buzzed inside the walls...

...His brother John took Annie to Chicago, but the change was hard on her: In Arlington she could take long walks, but in Chicago she felt trapped in an apartment...

...Many of the original settlers migrated to an art colony in Fairhope, Alabama, which scorned taxation and private ownership of land...

...Eventually, Appeal to Reason withered and died along with the decline of the Socialist Party...

...As the flames consumed her old clothes, she would dance about the fire, kicking her heels high and chanting, "Granny's going to have some new clothes...

...Swift's "rational" Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels are not nearly so interesting as the horrendous Yahoos...

...He was also for the most part an optimist...

...Its bankruptcy must have come as a surprise to the outside world since the colony had seemed to be flourishing...

...Too lazy to work, too honest to steal, and so you belong to the shabby genteel," she told the woman as she shut the door on her arm...

...Ruskin's influence shaped education at the commune, where every child was expected to learn a trade and an art...

...Most of the communalists were Northerners: Appomattox was but a generation earlier...

...I asked if he had any old documents from the commune...

...Granny told me that the commune broke down because everyone wanted to be a boss...

...According to Wayland's son, his father and Sinclair linked up after Wayland left the commune in 1895 to found Appeal to Reason, which became the largest socialist newspaper in the world with a circulation of half a million...

...his famous novel The Jungle had been secretly financed by commune founder Julius Wayland...

...Wayland had his managing editor, Fred Warren, give Sinclair money to write The Jungle...

...Shortly after they arrived at Ruskin, the elder Annie squatted in one of the recesses of the huge cavern beneath the commune and gave birth to another boy, Jerry...

...The late arrivals, including my inlaws, tried to establish another commune in Ruskin, Georgia, near Waycross and the Okefenokee Swamp...

...It must have given him a sense of satisfaction to see them coming...

...Privately, however, there had been much tension between the original colonists—idealistic socialists who had started the commune to be free from want—and those who came later, hoping to take part in a thriving enterprise...

...After smashing out the windows, Jerry swiftly dismantled the slingshot...

...Daughter Annie kicked me out of her place in Oklahoma and so I took the bus to Chicago...

...I'm your mother-in-law, Annie Butler," she said...

...About 500 people were living at the commune, and it had assets of almost $100,000 from various enterprises...

...The comrades of the Ruskin Commune did their best to pattern their lives on their namesake's writings...

...Shhh...

...Every resident of the commune, regardless of skill, worked ten hours a day to receive scrip that could be exchanged at the communal store for clothing, bread, vegetables, meat, and other supplies—goods that were produced, for the most part, at the commune...

...He set forth his radical views on religion, education, mythology, and poverty in several books and a series of "letters" to laborers entitled Fors Clavigera, or "fortune bearing a club...

...He was a Republican printer and devoted capitalist in Indiana, then a postmaster and alleged carpetbagger in postbellum Missouri, a prosperous real estate speculator in Colorado, a socialist newspaper publisher back home in Indiana, the founder of Ruskin in Tennessee, and finally, in the last period of his stormy life, publisher of a Kansas-based socialist newspaper that grew larger than any of its kind before or since...

...Comets like Julius Wayland come along once in a blue moon...

...Another crash and another window was broken...

...Jerry," I said, "what are you doing...

...Propagandist of Socialism Julius Augustus Wayland was forty years old when, in the summer of 1894, the power of his press began to attract colonists from all over the United States to his socialist Utopia, Ruskin, in rural Tennessee...

...With few exceptions, he has been memorialized only in his own writings...

...one of his admirers called Way-land "the greatest propagandist of socialism that has ever lived...

...Ignoring my horrified protests, he methodically shot out three small windows above the store's main entrance and two large plate-glass windows...

...Annie herself was four years old when Lincoln was assassinated, and she told me her grandmother had spanked her for tying a black shawl to the front door as a sign of mourning...

...Before we left New York, Jerry smashed the laundry windows twice more...

...In 1894, when the commune was founded, my husband's father, John Albin Butler, was earning a meager living doing factory piecework and delivering milk in Derby, Connecticut...

...On Saturday, June 19, of that year, several hundred colonists gathered to dedicate the institution...

...Local fathers eventually burned the Ruskin dance hall to keep their daughters from dancing in the round...

...Butler subscribed to The Coming Nation and saw the invitation to families with $500 to join the commune...