93-09-14 Historian Looks Homeward in New Study HISTORIAN LOOKS HOMEWARD IN NEW STUDY OF THE ORIGINS OF AN AMERICAN UTOPIAN COMMUNITY CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Sept. 14 -- A new book by a University of Virginia historian tells the story of the founding of the longest-surviving American community established as a secular "utopia" to promote social and economic reform. The book, "Man and Mission: E.B. Gaston and the Origins of the Fairhope Single Tax Colony," appears this month, as the modern city of Fairhope, Ala. (pop. 9,000), a busy, typical-seeming suburb of Mobile, prepares to celebrate its 100th birthday next year. For history professor Paul M. Gaston, author of influential studies of the U.S. South and a former president of the Southern Regional Council, it is also a book about his hometown and his grandfather. "Man and Mission," published by The Black Belt Press of Montgomery, Ala., is set in the closing years of the 19th century, a time of increasing social unrest and wide gaps between rich and poor. Thousands of reformers all over the country, with varying philosophies, talked of ways to change society. One of the most radical ideas was the establishment of experimental demonstration- communities, and some 200, many of them short-lived, were started during the century. Among these fervent activists was a young idealistic Iowa newspaperman named Ernest B. Gaston, who worked for awhile for the new Populist Party and its candidate for president, Gen. James B. Weaver. E.B. Gaston believed, says his historian-grandson, that "opportunities for honest men were vanishing" in the America of the 1880s, as a wildly competitive society fed land speculation and rampant monopoly-capitalism. Driven by outrage at the suffering he saw around him and by his own strong ambition, E.B. Gaston developed social and economic ideas that eventually became the plan for a reform community. After discussions with a handful of like-minded thinkers, in 1894 he led some 28 men, women and children to a scenic, undeveloped tract of land the group had purchased on the Alabama coast. Fairhope was to be a model of a cooperative, democratic community. Among its guiding notions were the "single tax" principles of the American reformer-philosopher Henry George, whose ideas are still espoused by some on both the left and right today. Settlers who came to Fairhope could buy a home site or business site for $1 and had to pay only one annual tax, on the value of the land. The colony in return provided utilities and community improvements, including parklands and a school, and paid all outside taxes. "The idea," says Paul Gaston, "was that a single tax -- on land, a common heritage -- promoted opportunity and creativity and would end land speculation." After a rocky start, the colony's land policy attracted numerous hard-working settlers from various parts of the country. The natural beauty of the location, together with cooperative development and "a public policy that declared scarce resources to belong to all citizens. . . .nurtured a kind of democratic communalism," says Gaston. "Few people were either rich or poor; hierarchy and pretension found unfertile soil; social intercourse was easy and informal; homes were simple but often innovative and appealing; architecture and town development reflected a society free of sharp class divisions." Artists, writers and craftspeople also found the colony, soon to be incorporated as a town, congenial. As its reputation grew in the early years of this century, several famous visitors, including Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, Mrs. Henry Ford, and Clarence Darrow, came to observe. "Not surprisingly, the community also had more than its share of mavericks, people who expressed strong opinions on how life ought to be lived," says Gaston, who has pored over Fairhope's extensive archives and as a young boy had breakfast there with his grandfather every Sunday. The town also had a significant feature in its non- competitive, ungraded school, directed by a reformer from Minnesota named Marietta Johnson. The Fairhope School of Organic Education and what its founder called the "Fairhope Idea in Education," aimed at educating the "whole" child and became a modest national movement, says Gaston. It was based on the ideas of John Dewey, America's leading philosopher of progressive education, who himself came to visit Fairhope. Paul Gaston, before going off to serve in the U.S. Army in 1946 and then to study at Swarthmore College and at the University of North Carolina for a Ph.D., attended the Fairhope school all the way through high school. "I hold the record for going longer than anyone else, because at age three-and-a-half I showed up to enroll and they let me in. Or so the story goes." The school still exists as a small private school, although not strictly following the original philosophy. "Fairhopers believed that their model community, imperfect though it was, gave the nation an example to follow," says Gaston, who was 10 when his grandfather died in 1938. C.A. Gaston, the historian's father, continued to lead the community's single-tax association for more than 30 years after that. The Depression and World War II brought changes to the Gulf Coast region, including the town of Fairhope, which had grown to include much more than the original colony lands and was not bound by the colony's rules and aims. With the coming of the war and a military boom in the area, Fairhope's population nearly doubled. "Few of the newcomers understood the shared sense of purpose on which the colony had been founded," says Gaston. "Fairhope cased to be mentioned in discussions of radical and utopian social movements and was no longer a magnet for people looking to solve social problems." The modern Fairhope is a charming city that still reflects its origins in its support for the arts and tolerance for individualism, Gaston believes. It seems today much like any other American town, except for the peculiarity that the Single Tax Corporation still owns and leases about 30 percent of the lands, operating more like a community association than a radical group. "It was -- and is -- a lovely place to live," says Gaston, who returns there often to visit. "It was exhilarating, an exciting place to be" when he was a youth there in the 1930s and 40s. "I grew up a utopian idealist, thinking that everything wrong with the country could be fixed by the `single tax' and by progressive education. I have a more complex view of the world now." For one thing, he says, he came to see "there was a dark side" to the story of Fairhope. Despite its utopian ideals, the original colony accepted only white settlers and was as segregated as the rest of the South of that period. "My grandfather rationalized this by feeling that integration of the community would not be tolerated by others in the region. And he believed that a model system of economic justice would help racism disappear. But it was a huge compromise. It goes to show nothing happened in the South without race becoming an issue." Looking back, he also realized there were community power struggles, materialistic impulses, and despite few economic disparities, there were class distinctions, with his own founding family being among the elite. When he went off to college, he planned to major in economics and return to Fairhope to help lead the community and edit the newspaper his family ran. "I really believed in Fairhope's ideals," he says. But along the way, he became more interested in history than economics; his father put no pressure on him to return, and his mother began to drop suggestions that "there was a much bigger world out there." So he eventually went on to a career as a scholar, which has included writing a noted study about the South, "The New South Creed," and teaching regular undergraduate research seminars at U.Va. using Fairhope to offer unique insights into the origins of American utopian communities. Like his grandfather and father, he also found a cause; in his case, it was the civil rights movement. Deeply involved in civil rights activities around the South, he served on the board of the Southern Regional Council, the South's oldest biracial anti- discrimination organization, and from 1984 to 1988 as president. He is also working on a longer study of Fairhope. "I've always thought of Fairhope as being different," Gaston says. "Some religious utopian communities were started to escape the larger society, and secular ones wanted to be model communities to guide the larger society to reform. E.B. Gaston thought that most cooperative communities failed because authority was usually concentrated in the community itself, leaving no room for individual differences. He allowed for individualism in Fairhope. Some say Fairhope lasted so long because it was not really in the tradition of utopian societies." But like all the others, Fairhope didn't finally succeed in its aims, did it? "I think Fairhope did succeed," says Gaston. "It showed a commitment to ideals, offered a human example that can be instructive to us. It showed us that one of the good things about America is that there has always been room to try out different ideas." ### September 13, 1993 [Paul Gaston will read from "Man and Mission" at 8:30 p.m. Sept. 22 at Williams Corner Bookstore in Charlottesville. Review copies of the book are available from The Black Belt Press, P.O. Box 551, Montgomery, AL 36101, (205) 265-6753. For interviews Gaston may be reached at (804) 924-7949.] [Submitted by: John Price-Wilkin (jpw@sansfoy.lib.virginia.edu) Tue, 14 Sep 1993 23:55:34 -0400 (EDT)]