Tweet-A-Week: The Oneida Community

          The basic idea of what the Oneida Community was is that it was a community that strove to share damn near everything. It was founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York. People who wanted to be a part of the community had to follow certain rules to live peacefully with the group. They believed that the 2nd Coming of Christ had already occurred and that therefore, Heaven on Earth was possible, so they aimed to create a harmonious community. Property and assets were shared. So were romantic partners. Two people were not even allowed to be mutually exclusive... If you could have sex, you hadda get passed around a little bit. Then they also had this rule of male continence/coitus reservatus, and felt that keeping men from climaxing led to deeper connections between sexual partners, and they had other rules about virgins coming into the communities and being "introduced" to the community by older council people who got to pick their virgin, which is kinda nasty and probably even manipulative, but yeah...
          So what does this have to do with Walt Whitman? Well the Oneida Community was founded in New York while Walt Whitman was around, that's for sure. But beyond that, from reading Song of Myself, we see Walt writing about how he is everything, and everything is him... just as you are everything, and everything is you. While that may not be possible to achieve in a physical sense (unless we could all be melted and poured into a pot or something) the Oneida Community seems to try to accomplish this in the best way they knew how: By sharing everything. Without the normal ideas of money and the status it brings, the community could try to achieve less degrees of separation between individuals than we may currently experience in our capitalist world. By putting the community first, the idea that you are a part of something bigger than yourself (i.e. the community) becomes engrained in your psyche and would probably lead to stronger connections to the other people in your community. So was the Oneida Community, or other communist communities, a literal interpretation of Song of Myself? Not really. But the Oneida Community is an example of a community that tried to break at least a few barriers that keep us as individuals separate from one another.