In the mid-1800s, long before the Soviet Union or Maoist China, a French political dreamer named Étienne Cabet tried to build a communist utopia... in the heart of America. What followed was a bizarre, ambitious, and often comically disastrous experiment involving disease, deception, authoritarian hypocrisy, failed frontier settlements, buying an abandoned Mormon town, and one of the strangest forgotten social movements in U.S. history.