← Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes
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- [00:02]
Vanessa Richardson
Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide case. The interrogations, the dead ends, and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts. This is crime house. In the late 1800s, deep in the woods of upstate New York, around 300 people lived together under one roof. A 93,000 square foot mansion they'd built themselves. They ran a booming business making world world class silverware and silk thread. The women cut their hair short, wore practical clothing, and had a real say in how the place was run decades before American women could even vote. There was a library, a theater, a newspaper, even a brass band. From the outside, the Oneida community seemed like paradise. A place that was light years ahead of the rest of the world. But if you actually went inside that gilded mansion and you would find a very different story. Nobody here owned private property. Nobody had an exclusive marriage. In fact, nobody was allowed to love one specific person more than another. Children were raised collectively, taken from their parents at around age one. The man behind all of it was a preacher named John Humphrey Noyes. He decided who his followers slept with, and he believed he could breed a more perfect generation of human beings. Which meant he also decided who was allowed to become a parent in the first place. Couples had to go before a committee and prove they were spiritually worthy enough to have a child. Noise controlled the pairings. He approved the pregnancies. And of the 58 children born this way, nine were his own. He used the language of God to justify all of it and make sure nobody could ever challenge him. The Oneida community lasted 33 years in. It produced a silverware brand that still fills American drawers. And it left behind a question nobody has ever fully Was this a utopia? Or was it abuse? Or at Oneida, were those the same thing? From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes, A crime House original Powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are all wild and I want to hear what you think at the end of each episode. Please leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, just tap. Try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page before we get started. This episode includes discussions of child sexual assault and incest, so please listen with care Today I'm investigating the Oneida Community, a religious commune in upstate New York. Depending on who you asked, it was either the most progressive experiment in American history or one of the most sophisticated systems of coercive control ever built. For over three decades, founder John Humphrey Noyes controlled nearly every part of his followers lives who they slept with, who could have children and how those children were raised. He called it perfectionism, but it didn't last. And when it ended, it left behind hundreds of people with nowhere else to go. Years earlier, it had spit out a member who would fill a void of his own in the most infamous way imaginable. Assassinating the President of the United States. So how did a Yale educated preacher build a commune of 300 true believers and hold onto them for 30 years? What actually happened inside those walls and what finally brought it tumbling down? All that and more coming up. We've all been there. You look up. Suddenly life has thrown so much at you that your to do list is completely out of control. For me, it was last month when I moved and I needed to install a cabinet in my B bathroom and fix a broken light fixture. I knew just where to turn. Finding A tasker on TaskRabbit makes tackling your to do list even easier, and I honestly felt this wave of blissful relief watching a seasoned tasker handle it all in a couple of hours. 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- [07:04]
Vanessa Richardson
Unlike a lot of cult leaders, John Humphrey Noyes didn't come from nothing. In fact, he came from one of the most connected families in Vermont. He was born on September 3, 1811 in Brattleboro, the fourth of nine children. His father was a one term Congressman and his mother was the aunt of a future president, Rutherford B. Hayes. Growing up, Noyes gravitated toward the law and he probably would have made a good lawyer. But in 1831 he went to a revival meeting in Putney, Vermont. He walked in a skeptic and walked out a changed man. That same year he enrolled at Andover Theological Seminary, then transferred to Yale. That's where he found an idea that would take over his life, and it was called perfectionism, the belief that human beings could be freed from sin and made perfect not in heaven, but right here on earth. Noyes was still a seminary student at the time, but he took that idea further than anyone ever had. He concluded that the second coming had already happened way back in the year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed, the kingdom of God wasn't on its way, it was already here. It he decided the only reason nobody was living in divine perfection was that nobody had committed to building it. And he was pretty sure he was the man for the job. Now here's the thing about John Humphrey Noyes. Before any of this, he was super shy. He wrote in his diary that he could, quote, face a battery of cannon with less trepidation than a room full of ladies. He didn't know, end quote. What changed him was the pulpit. When Noyes preached, something happened to him and something happened to the people listening. They talked about his shining gray eyes, his intensity, the way he could hold a room. In February 1834, Noyes preached a public sermon at the Free Church of New Haven. He told the congregation that humans could be freed from sin. And then he went for further. He claimed it for himself. Someone in the crowd called out, don't you commit sin? Noyes answered, no. Word spread fast. By nightfall, the whole seminary knew two things. That Noise thought he was perfect and that he must be crazy. After the sermon, his preaching license was revoked and Yale pushed him out of the program. Noise wasn't phased. As he put it later, quote, they took away my license to sin and they go on sinning. They have taken away my license to preach, but I shall go on preaching. End quote. And that's exactly what he did. He started his own newspaper, the Perfectionist, and spent years wandering through rural New England, preaching as he went. And people listened. It's worth slowing down here and examining why people actually cared about what he had to say. Part of it was the era, which Noyes himself was a product of. He'd been converted at a revival, and the whole country was caught up in the same fervor. In the first half of the 19th century, more than 100,000Americans joined utopian communities of some kind. The hottest pocket was a stretch of upstate New York, where revivals came so often it earned a nickname, the Burned Over District. People said it had been so thoroughly evangelized, there was no fuel left to burn. This was the soil the Mormons grew out of, along with the Adventists and the Millerites. And then there was Noise himself. Plenty of preachers were out there promising heaven. So why did this one land? It probably had something to do with the people he was preaching to. Most of them had been raised Calvinist. And Calvinism is, to put it bluntly, brutal. You're born a sinner and you'll die a sinner. Maybe you're saved, maybe you're not, and there's nothing you can do about it either way. You just spend your whole life waiting to find out. And then Noise walks in and says, no, you don't have to wait. You can be free of sin right now. Not in heaven, not after you die, but here in this room with me. And he wasn't pitching this as a theory. He was claiming he'd already done it. He was living proof for people worn down by a lifetime of you are born broken. That was electrifying. It was like being told a debt you'd been paying your whole life was never actually yours. And the charisma did the rest. People who heard Noyes preach, even people who thought he was wrong, talked about his certainty. He never wavered, never doubted. He told you he had the answer, and soon enough, he found someone willing to be bed on it. In 1838, Noyes married a woman named Harriet Holton. He was upfront with her from the start. The marriage would be open, and they'd each be free to love other people. That was fine by Harriet, and she brought something else to the marriage. Harriet was an heiress and ended up bankrolling Noyes publishing business. They even spent their honeymoon in Albany buying a printing press. After that, they went back to Putney, Vermont, the town where Noyes had been converted years earlier, and a circle started forming around him. Friends, family, and locals who'd read his pamphlets showed up at their house wanting more. He organized them into a Bible class in 1839. Within a few years, it was a community. By the mid-1840s, around 30 people were living together, sharing property, sharing labor, sharing everything. Among the first to join were a couple named Mary and George Cragan. George worked as a printer. He was steady and devoted, the dependable type. Mary was something else entirely. People described her as magnetic and deeply feeling, the kind of person you can't look away from. Noise was drawn to her immediately, and she seemed to feel the same way. When the Putney circle drafted their statement of principles pledging quote to John H. Noyes, we submit ourselves in all things, including their bodies. Mary and George Craigen were some of the first to sign. George accepted his wife's relationship with Noyes as theology. And right around then, Noyes started introducing the idea that would come to define everything. He called it complex marriage. The logic went like traditional monogamy was possessive, selfish, and spiritually inferior. In the kingdom of God, which, remember, Noyes believed, had already arrived, there'd be no exclusive pairings. Every man was married to every woman. Every woman was married to every man. That meant any member could pursue a sexual relationship with anyone else in the community. But there was a protocol. A man would send word through a third party so a woman could say no without it being awkward. And the community promised that every woman was free to refuse. So, in theory, nobody was ever forced. But that got a lot more complicated when Noyes introduced another practice called ascending fellowship. This was a rule that said younger members should be introduced to sex by Older, spiritually higher members. The idea was that they'd ascend toward holiness through their partner. This dovetailed with another practice called male continence. This was sex without ejaculation, and it was mostly a way to prevent unwanted pregnancies. It was also a skill that apparently had to be mastered. So the community paired younger men who were still learning, with older women past childbearing age. The community called this mentorship spiritual education. But there's a plainer word for it. Abuse. The sexual initiation of children by adults with the full institutional blessing of everyone around them. One of those children was a girl named Tirzah Miller. She was Noyes own niece. Born into the Putney circle, she'd never known any other world. She was also brilliant, a gifted writer and musician. One of the most prominent young women in the community, Noyes was grooming her to be the intellectual star of its next generation. For more than a century, the diary Tza kept stayed private. It wasn't open to scholars until 1993. And when it finally was, it became one of the only first person accounts we have of what it actually felt like to be a young woman inside this system. What it reveals is a person at war with herself. Tirzah believed in the community. She believed in noise. And she also desperately wanted the one thing the group had branded a sin. A single person of her own to love. Every time she got close to someone, the relationship was broken up. And when she first realized she was pregnant, she didn't write about joy or hope. She wrote, quote, my death warrant, end quote. She never publicly condemned any of it. She couldn't. The only words she had to describe what was being done to her were the community's own. Tirzah came to the system as a child with no choice and no way out. Mary Cragan came to it as a true believer, right at the top. And by the mid-1840s, she'd entered into what Noise called called a group marriage, which included her, her husband George and Noise and his wife Harriet. Then she got pregnant with Noises twins. Now, Mary wasn't a victim of complex marriage the way later members would be. She'd chosen it. But her pregnancy is what blew the whole thing wide open. The arrangement had been an open secret in Putney for a while. Once the authorities caught wind of it, it became a full blown scandal. In October 1847, Noyes was arrested and charged with adultery. He had no intention of showing up for the trial. He'd later describe his escape with the kind of dramatic flair that became his trademark. He said we left not to escape the law, but to prevent an outbreak of lynch law among the barbarians of Putney. So he he headed to central New York. There, a sawmill owner named Jonathan Burt had read Noyes theology and bought in completely. And he'd been waiting for exactly this moment. Bert offered up his land and noise sent for his people. It was the beginning of the Oneida community. A blank slate in the woods, far from the scandal and the warrants where Noyes could finally build his pen perfect world with no one around to stop him.
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- [19:07]
Vanessa Richardson
On a freezing March Day in 1848, Harriet Noyes and the Kragans stepped off a train at the Oneida depot. They looked out at snowdrifts and bare trees climbing into open sleighs, and rode out to a barn and a simple cabin sitting on 23 rolling acres. They took their name from the land they settled on along Oneida Creek, and the Oneida community was born. Within a year, there were 87 members and many more to come. And the community was thriving in other ways, too. A lot of that came down to one man, Sewell Newhouse. Before joining Oneida, he'd invented a steel animal trap, and Noyes saw the potential right away. By 1870, Oneida was cranking out more than 300,000 traps a year, that's over $114,000 in annual sales. That's roughly $2.5 million today. They'd added silk thread, fruit canning, and in 1877, the thing they'd become famous for, silverware. By then, they were employing about 200 paid workers from outside the community. A reporter from the New York Tribune visited in 1867 and couldn't quite believe what he was looking at. 500 acres, vineyards, orchards, a brass band, a library. He wrote, quote, they employ no physician, for they need none. No lawyer, for they are peaceable, and no preacher, for they are perfect. By 1878, they'd finished the Mansion House, a 93,000 square foot communal home where nearly 300 people lived, worked, and put on plays. And the design tells you a lot. The individual bedrooms were tiny, single occupancy, and they all opened onto shoes, shared parlors, so members could always see who was coming and going. The architecture itself enforced a kind of constant surveillance. Everyone was visible to everyone. Everyone except Noyes, who over the years moved through three different sets of rooms, each one bigger and more private than the last. To the neighbors in Oneida county, these people were a little strange. There were whispered stories about the sleeping arrangements, but the traps were selling, the fields were producing, and the library was stocked. Local prosecutors couldn't find any real grounds to come after them, and most of the local press actually defended them. Whatever they were doing in there, it was working. What the neighbors couldn't see, what nobody on the outside could see, was how noise kept it working. Every night, after dinner, after the meetings, after the newspaper had been put away, there was a ritual. You'd sit down in the middle of the room, and one by one, everyone you knew, your friends, your co workers, the people you ate every meal with, would tell you exactly what was wrong with you. And you just had to sit there and take it. Noyes had a name for it. Mutual criticism. From the outside, it sounded almost reasonable, but once you were inside, it hit completely differently. And we actually have an eyewitness account of one of these sessions. In the 1870s, a journalist named Charles Nordoff, who traveled the country documenting American communes, sat in on one. The member in the hot seat that night had committed a very specific sin. He'd fallen in love with the woman who was pregnant with his child, and he wanted to be close to her, to the community. That was a failing, so they took turns telling him so. And then Noyes himself stepped in to deliver the verdict, praising the man for agreeing to pull away from the woman entirely. And Let another man take his place at her side. Noyes called it a, quote, praiseworthy spirit of self sacrifice. It's bizarre to think about. A man is being publicly congratulated for giving up the woman carrying his child, and everyone around him is supposed to watch, learn from it, and call it spiritual growth. Did Noyes ever face criticism himself? Well, occasionally, yes. Though by every account, his sessions went a lot easier than everyone else's. But that man in the hot seat, his real crime was loving one person too much. The community had a name for that sticky love.
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Vanessa Richardson
And they treated it like a disease. Mutual criticism was the cure. It made dissent visible, then crushed it in public, in front of everyone you knew. It worked, but not on everyone. Between 1855 and 1880, at least 84 adults walked away from the community. They just couldn't take it anymore. One of those people was a man named Vic Victor Holly. Holly kept a diary written in an archaic shorthand that wasn't discovered and translated until decades later by the scholar Robert Fogarty. In the late 1870s, Holly was a 30 year old dental assistant at Oneida. He collected butterflies and he had fallen deeply and hopelessly in love with a woman named Mary Jones. Out in the regular world, that would have been the most ordinary thing imaginable. At Oneida, it was a crisis. So Noyes denied their request to have a child together and kept them apart. And then he gave Mary Jones to another man and had her bear a child by Noyes own son instead. Holly's diary is the record of a man being torn in half. He lived at Oneida for years. He genuinely believed in perfectionism. And no matter how hard he tried to, he couldn't stop loving Mary Jones. He also couldn't make himself believe that what was being done to them was right. In 1877, after more than two decades at Oneida, Holly finally left and took Mary Jones with him. They got married. The diary he left behind is one of the clearest windows we have into what it cost to love someone inside Oneida. The next person I want to tell you about had the opposite experience. His name was Charles Guiteau. Guiteau turned up at Oneida in 1860. At 18 years old, he didn't have much of a plan for his life. So his father, who believed in Noyes theology, though he never joined himself, sent him there. Charles handed over his small inheritance to Noyes and moved in. He was a disaster from day one. Convinced God had singled him out for greatness, he took to calling himself God's minute Man. He expected to be welcomed, admired. He expected the free love to actually be, you know, free. But the women of Oneida wanted nothing to do with him. They gave him a nickname, Charles get out. He got handed manual labor he thought was beneath him. He sat through mutual criticism sessions that left him pale and sweating, and he was told over, over and over to work on his pride. In April 1865, he asked to leave so he could spread Noyes teachings through a newspaper. He was sure God wanted him to start. The community, let him go. The paper, the Daily Theocrat, never launched. So he came back, begged his way in, lasted about a year, then snuck out in the middle of the night to dodge yet another criticism session. Later, Guiteau actually sued the community for $9,000 in back wages. Noyes wrote back that Guiteau was, quote, moody, self conceited, unmanageable. Oh, and also insane. Eventually, the suit was dropped and Guiteau drifted. He failed as a lawyer. He got married, then engineered his own divorce by sleeping with a sex worker and making sure his wife found out. He tried journalism. He tried bill collecting. Everything fell apart. And then in 1880, convinced that God had personally assigned him to save the Republican party, he started stalking President James Garfield. On July 2, 1881, he shot Garfield twice at a Washington train station. And here's the twist. Garfield survived the shooting shooting. What killed him was the doctors. They kept probing the wound with unwashed fingers, and he died of the infection on September 19. Guiteau was hanged in June 1882, singing a hymn he'd written himself on the way to the gallows. He is the most infamous product of Oneida and maybe the most honest. He didn't experience the system as liberation. He experienced it as part of punishment. And unlike the members who stayed and found ways to keep believing, he told everyone, loudly, exactly how much he'd hated it. At his trial, he summed up his years there like this quote. I want you to imagine yourselves in hell, ladies and gentlemen. And then you can form some idea of my experience in the Oneida community. Now, those two stories make Oneida sound like. Like a straightforward nightmare. But here's where it gets genuinely complicated. Oneida gave women real freedoms that were radical for the 19th century. They wore practical clothing when that was considered scandalous. They had an actual say in how the community was run. They weren't stuck being solely responsible for raising their own kids. Some of them, like Harriet, Allen, Joselyn, became prominent business women. Allan helped build the Silk operation and and later sat on the board of oneida Limited, which was almost unheard of for a woman at the time. Those things were real, but so was the abuse and coercion. One man had authority over everyone's most intimate relationships. Teenage girls were sexually initiated by adults as a matter of doctrine, and any real love, any attachment to one specific person, could be broken down in public. The freedom and the manipulation weren't two separate things. They were the same system running on the same engine. What you experienced inside Oneida came down to who you were and how much noise liked you. Because by the late 1860s, he wasn't just controlling who his followers slept with, he was controlling who got to exist. It started with the children. Kids at Oneida were raised communally. From around age 1. They lived in the children's house, looked after by assigned caregivers. Parents could visit, but if the community decided you were getting too attached, they'd cut off your access to your own child until you got the message. And then, in 1869, Noyes took it to its logical extreme. He decided he would control who got to become a parent in the first place. Members who wanted a child now had to apply to a committee. The committee weighed their spiritual and moral fitness and decided whether they were worthy and, if they were, who their partner would be. Those who got approved signed a formal pledge, essentially handing over any say in the matter to Noyes and the community. And he gave the whole thing a name, Stirpiculture, a word he coined himself from the Latin stirps, meaning stalk or stem. It's the language you use for breeding livestock or cultivating plants. And that's essentially how Noyes saw it. A way to selectively breed human beings into a superior generation. This was eugenics. Years before the word eugenics had even been invented, the children the program produced, the Stirpicults, as they were called, were raised communally from the start. They weren't allowed to have favorites, not even among their toys. Everything was shared. They were community property from birth. One of those children was Pierrepont Noyes, John Humphrey Noyes own son, born in 1870. Years later, Pierpont wrote a memoir of his Oneida childhood called My Father's House. And honestly, he had a lot of warm things to say about growing up there. But when it came to his father, he wrote that the man never really felt like a father at all. He said he revered him, but he was always too far away, too near, as Pierpont put it, to heaven and God. Too near to heaven and God. Not a dad. Something more like an institution, something you worship from a distance. The program ran for 10 years. 53 women and 38 men took part. 58 children were born, and nine of them were fathered by Noyes himself. Which makes a grim kind of sense if you genuinely believe you're the most perfect man alive. And there's one more piece of this that has to be said out loud. The incest wasn't an accident or a rumor. It was built in. Remember Tirzah Miller, the niece whose diary we heard from earlier? Her relationship with Noyes was a sexual one. And it wasn't only Noyes. His own brother, George Washington Noyes, fathered Tirzah's first child back in 1870. Noyes had a theological justification for all of it, of course, he always did. But strip the theology away, and what's left is a man who designed a human breeding program and used it in part to keep his own bloodline at the center of everything. It would take decades for anyone outside the family to understand the full scale of what what he'd done. For the moment, noise was more powerful than ever. But underneath him, the ground was already starting to shift.
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- [34:41]
Vanessa Richardson
By the late 1870s, John Humphrey Noyes had been running Oneida for 330 years. He'd built something genuinely impressive and something genuinely monstrous at the same time. And then it fell apart, not from any single cause, but from three at economic collapse, legal pressure from the outside, and a fracture from within. Let's start with the money. From the very beginning, Noyes had planted Oneida squarely inside the capitalist economy, not apart from it. And he tied God's blessing directly to the bottom Line. In 1855, a communist newsletter said, quote, the special blessing of God upon any business is the grand element of success. For a long time, that theology seemed to be working. The traps sold, the money came in. But in 1873, all that changed. A financial panic set off by railroad speculation and a string of bank failures and tipped the country into what became known as the Long Depression. It would drag on for years, wiping out businesses across America. And Oneida wasn't spared. With customers unable to pay their bills, trap production got cut. The silk factory slowed to half capacity. The fruit canning operation shut down entirely. By 1877, the community was running an annual deficit of more than $32,000. By 1879, in their own words, they'd scarcely paid their way for the last five years. They were $60,000 in debt. Now, remember, this was a theology that equated God's blessing with making money. So a financial collapse wasn't just a business problem, it was a spiritual one. In their minds, God had pulled his blessing. While that was happening, the pressure from outside was building, too. A Hamilton College professor named John Mears gathered 47 clergymen to publicly campaign against the community. The New York Times piled on, and prosecutors started taking a hard look at the stirpiculture program, specifically at what had been done to the miners inside it. And then there was the fracture from within. A whole younger generation had grown up inside Oneida, and a lot of them wanted the one thing Noyes had always forbidden. A traditional, exclusive marriage. The right to love one person and be loved back. Noyes own sister counted seven different factions fighting it out inside the commune. Noyes tried to hand the whole thing off to his son Theodore. But Theodore was an agnostic with none of his father's magnetism, and he was gone within seven months. Then, in June 1879, Noyes got a warning from a trusted advisor. The authorities were coming for him on statutory rape charges, and a warrant was already on its way. So Noyes did what he'd always done. When he was cornered, he ran in the middle of the night. On June 22, 1879, John Humphrey noyes slipped out of the mansion house he'd built, crossed the border into Canada, and never set foot in the United States again. From across the border, he sent his followers one last piece of advice. Drop complex marriage. If they gave it up voluntarily, maybe they could dodge prosecution. Maybe the community could survive without him. But giving up complex marriage didn't just change one rule. It pulled out the keystone. Suddenly, people were competing for partners. Women who'd never had to raise a child on their own now did, sometimes one that wasn't even biologically theirs. And everything that had made Oneida feel like an escape. The shared property, the shared labor, the shared everything now just felt ordinary. The minutes from a community meeting on July 18, 1880, said it all. The secretary, Francis Wayland Smith, was, wrote that the community's credit was being threatened by, quote, our divisions and internal dissensions. He noted that many members had simply stopped working. They saw no point. In 1880, it was over. The Oneida Community voted itself out of existence as a commune and reorganized as a corporation, Oneida Community Limited. On January 1, 1881, the company officially took over, and the commune was formally gone. The shares got handed out, but not equally. Take Harriet Worden, an unmarried mother of three community children who'd given decades of her labor to oneida. She received 115 shares and spent the rest of her working life in the factory. Sewell Newhouse, the man who whose trap had made the community a fortune, had never patented his invention, and he got nothing. His daughter was issued 87 shares. Meanwhile, a manager named Myron Kinsley walked away with 1,241. Another. Erastus Hamilton got 750. The people who'd given the most ended up with the least. The silverware business, the one they'd only started in 1877, survived. And then it grew. By the 20th century, Oneida Limited was the largest silverware company in the world. Noyes died in Canada in 1886 at 74 years old. He never faced a single criminal charge. Then, in 1947, his descendants decided to bury the past for good. Embarrassed by what he did, built, they gathered up the community's archives. The diaries, the records, the documentation of the stirpiculture program, the sexual practices, the abuse. And they burned all of it. But not everything was destroyed. Tirzah Miller's diary survived. Victor Holly's diary survived. And in 1993, when the Archives were fully open to scholars, the full picture started to come into focus. The Oneida community leaves behind some questions that are hard to answer. How much consent really existed inside complex marriage? Noise built a system where stepping out of line meant being humiliated in front of everyone you knew, where falling in love with one specific person was treated as a spiritual failure, where teenagers were paired with adults as a matter of doctrine. Inside a system like that, what does the word yes actually mean? And the other question, why did it work for so long? Why did 300 intelligent people, many of whom genuinely benefited from Oneida's progressivism, stay inside something that was also doing them so much harm? Part of the answer is simple. Oneida really was exceptional. Of the more than 70 utopian community communities founded in America before the Civil War, most collapsed within a decade. Oneida lasted 33 years. It was prosperous. It was intellectual. For a lot of members, leaving meant going back to a world that had nothing similar to offer. And Noyes was very good at one specific thing, making the harm feel like freedom. He gave his followers real things, real community, real, Real intellectual life, real financial security. And then he used those things to make the violations feel like the price of admission. That's a big part of why systems like this are so hard to see clearly from the inside. The Oneida community was gone by 1881, but the questions it raised about communal living, about consent, about the blurry line between utopia and control, never really went away. They just changed. In Cult Watch this week, I'm looking at a group that took Oneida's most disturbing ideas and rebuilt them, almost beat for beat, except this time in the middle of Manhattan. They were called the Sullivanians. The Sullivan Institute for Research and Psychoanalysis opened its doors in New York City in 1957 and was founded by a husband and wife team, Saul Newton and Jane Pierce. Their core belief sounds almost familiar at this point, that the nuclear family and monogamous marriage were the root of human misery. So, like Noyes, they set out to abolish them. Patients were encouraged to cut ties with their parents and move into communal apartments on the Upper west side. By the 1970s, the group had grown into an urban commune of 300 or 400 people, strikingly close to Oneida's peak. They lived together, they slept with whoever the therapist thought best, and their children were raised collectively handed off to hired caregivers, while the parents time with their own kids was rationed and controlled. One woman who grew up inside it, Saul Newton's own daughter, summed up that childhood in four I was never alone. And like no noise, Newton slowly tightened his grip until it touched everything. His therapist dictated where members lived, who they dated, how often they could see their partners, and even their children. He grew more authoritarian and more intense by the year. He sexually exploited the women who came to him for help, and he quietly funneled members money, their savings, their inheritances into a comfortable private life for himself, while everyone else pooled everything. When Saul Newton died in 1991, the Sullivanians fell apart, leaving behind bitter custody battles and a generation of children trying to understand what had been done to them. Newton, like noise before him, never had to answer for his crimes. More than a century apart, in the same state, two men built the same man machine. The ideology that makes harm feel like growth, the relentless pressure that wears down resistance. The leader who decides what love is allowed to look like. That architecture is the same, and it doesn't require a mansion in the woods. Sometimes all it takes is an apartment building on a nice street and someone who can make people believe that giving themselves away is the proof price of becoming who they're meant to be. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference and to enhance your Conspiracy the Theory's Cults and Crimes listening experience. Subscribe to Crime House plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson, and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzofsky, Laurie Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Kaylee Pine, and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
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Vanessa Richardson
Chicago, IL hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another show I think you'll love. Crime House and A E are teaming up on the podcast version of the famous true crime series the First 48. Each week, Carter Roy takes you inside a landmark homicide side case, the interrogations, the dead ends and the breakthroughs in the critical first 48 hours. Listen to and follow the first 48 every Thursday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.