The Perfectionists

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1:14It was the western frontier, and there weren't churches, and there weren't preachers, and it was really up to you. In 1823, in Palmyra, New York, a man named Joseph Smith said he had a vision. He said an angel led him to buried golden plates. He later translated what was written on the plates into the Book of Mormon. The Shakers started by Anne Lee in 1776 with just a few followers, but she had thousands by the middle of the 19th century. The Shakers were originally known as Shaking Quakers for the way they danced in religious services. Anne Lee settled in Albany with her followers. Anne Lee believed that she was the representation on Earth of a bisexual god, and her followers were committed to complete celibacy.

2:08And, of course, they also made wonderful furniture, which is, I think, mostly what we know them for. But it was a completely new take on religion, but it really attracted people. There were also religious revivals happening in the area. Festivals lasting for days, filled with, as author Susan Wells puts it, wailing, jumping, and speaking in tongues, and ecstatic expressions of salvation. Not everyone approved. A minister who lived in New York called the area the Burnt District. It was aflame with radical religious movements. And this was a moment in American history where the individual was the world.

2:54And Emerson said that every reading man has a draft of a new community in his pocket. And the reason for that is that the War for Independence shattered institutions and traditions. and charismatic leaders filled the void with new imaginative social and religious structures. It's almost this idea of, you know, everybody, I deserve a full life. Not just a full life. Many people believed that they wanted to have an extraordinary life. Susan Wells is a historian and author of the book An Assassin in Utopia. In 1811, a man named John Humphrey Noyes was born in Brattleboro, Vermont. John Humphrey Noyes was the son of a former congressman and a redheaded mother named Polly Hayes, whose nephew was Rutherford B.

3:54Hayes, who became president of the United States. So I think it was a moment also in American history where a lot of people were related to each other. Anyway, he grew up in a family of men that were so incredibly shy that many of them ended up marrying their cousins. And John Humphrey Noyes himself was so paralyzingly shy of women that he couldn't even be in a room with ladies, he said, with whom he was unacquainted. He would rather be in front of canons than that. John Humphrey Noyes wrote in his diary, I could face a battery of cannon with less trepidation. His insecurity extended to his professional life.

4:36He went to school, he went to Dartmouth to study law. But in his first court appearance, he was so shy that he was just stumbling through his, he was stumbling through his first court appearance. He left law and decided to focus on religion instead. He eventually enrolled in Yale Divinity School. There was a professor there who told him to follow your own truth, even if it takes you over Niagara Falls. And there were so many alternative, personal, individual versions of Christianity that it was just an incredibly fertile time. And so John Humphrey Noyes was steeped in that. Soon, John Humphrey Noyes found an answer to his lifelong sense of insecurity.

5:31He had a religious conversion and came up with his own design for his life and for his own world. He decided that he was perfect. John Humphrey Noyes said that in his study of the Bible, he'd discovered a way to be free of sin right now. He didn't have to wait to get to heaven to be perfect. He also said he, and he alone, had a special connection with God. So it would be impossible for him to make bad or immoral choices. It was a way for him to deal with the world, because, of course, nobody could judge him if he was perfect. Nobody would have anything bad to say about him. He was outcast from the Divinity School and lost his license to preach.

6:23But he kept doing it anyway. In 1834, he started a monthly newspaper called The Perfectionist. It had more than 500 subscribers. Then John Humphrey Noyes fell in love with a woman who married someone else. He was devastated. And then John Humphrey Noyes announced that there was no such thing as marriage in heaven. He said, In a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse shall be restrained by law than why eating and drinking should be. The next year, John Humphrey Noyes married one of his followers. Harriet Holton was an heiress, and he used her money to help fund his newspaper.

7:10He and Harriet spent their honeymoon in Albany. They bought a printing press. Soon, they met another couple. They were two of John Humphrey Noyes' followers, named Mary and George Cragan. One evening, John Humphrey Noyes and Mary Cragan took a walk together. He wrote, quote, Coming to a lonely place, we sat on a rock by the roadside and talked. The temptation to go further was tremendous. John Humphrey Noyes told his wife Harriet what had happened. He wrote about the conversation in his diary. He said, My wife promptly expressed her entire sanction. It turned out Harriet had feelings for Mary Cragen's husband, George.

8:00And George felt the same. So the four of them decided to make an arrangement. They would combine their relationships into one to make a group marriage. Mary Cragen wrote, We have formed a circle which it is not easy for the devil to break. We find this evidence that our love is of God. Soon, more people joined the group marriage. And in terms of his shyness, he created a community where there was no shyness acceptable about sexual relations. Everybody was accessible to everybody else, and of course especially to John Humphrey Noyes, who could have his way with any woman in the community pretty much.

8:44The community lived in Putney, Vermont, until they were run out of town. The group marriage had been an open secret, but then Mary Cragen had John Humphrey Noyes' twins, and that was too much for their neighbors. He was charged with adultery and fornication. The group left Putney, and John Humphrey Noyes bought 23 acres of land in a place called Oneida in central New York. When the group arrived at Oneida, there was only one log hut on the property with a single room. By the end of the year, 87 men, women, and children had moved to Oneida, and together they had built a three-story building with room to sleep 100 people.

9:32So tell me a little bit more about the principles of the Oneida community. What rule did he instill in the community? Well, there were several rules. He actually coined the term free love, but it was really not free because he controlled pretty much everything. One of the major rules in the Oneida community is that men were not allowed to have an orgasm. So that was one of the rules. another rule was don't talk much and don't spend the night together so you could have an appointment a sexual appointment with anybody because you everybody in the oneida community was married to everybody else and you would extend and if you were a man you would extend an invitation to a female member of the community she would be allowed to decline it unless it was an invitation from one of the older leaders of the community, in which case she was seriously pressured to accept it.

10:30But once you were engaged in that communion, he discouraged talking, he discouraged spending too much time together, leave the table while you still have an appetite, he said. And he thought that too much talk caused impotence. And what were the other rules in terms of how the community lived sex aside? What type of a life was it for members of the community? Well, for many of them, it was wonderful, if you believe what they say. In terms of work, it was a very, I think, enlightened approach. Members were encouraged to rotate through different jobs. They were encouraged to play. Their work time would be interrupted by 10 minutes of fiddle music and dancing.

11:20The women of Oneida didn't wear corsets. They wore pants. They cut their hair short. Perhaps we don't look as well as your city belle, who is puffed and padded and painted, one woman said. But we are genuine, from head to toe. While men were not permitted to have orgasms, the women were. Susan Wells writes that the men, quote, prided themselves on their virtuosity. The rule against men's orgasms meant that Oneida women weren't likely to get pregnant if they didn't want to. Susan Wells says that John Humphrey Noyes believed that women were inferior to men, but he allowed them to work in the same jobs.

12:06A woman became the editor of the community's newspaper. Another was Oneida's bookkeeper. At Oneida, people were encouraged to make work of their personal talents. One member, who was a hunter, invented his own kind of animal trap. The community built a factory to manufacture it, and they were sold all over the country. Oneida started other businesses, too. It made silk thread and jam. And by the 1860s, they were so prosperous that they were able to hire their neighbors, you know, 200 of them, to do a lot of their industrial and farming tasks, freeing up the members to have more fun. At one point, John Humphrey Noyes had the idea for members of Oneida to have sex on stage.

12:54He said, It is a sight which would purify the whole community. We shall never have heaven till we can conquer shame. John Humphrey Noyes believed sex brought Oneidans closer to God. John Humphrey Noyes made absolutely no attempt to hide it. In fact, he publicized it widely in the annual reports that he wrote and also in the newspaper, which they produced daily and they distributed to subscribers at no cost. And he believed that by informing everybody about this new model for society and for sexual relations, that he would convert the world. It was so popular and so well-known that in the 1860s, more than 50 ,000 people came to the Oneida community to tour it.

13:50And on fine Sundays, they would host mobs of tourists with strawberries and cream and ice cream and beer. And so many people came that they had to put up signs warning people against graffiti, trampling the flowers, poking their noses into members' bedrooms, etc. And it was so popular that the railroad built a special spur to the Oneida community with a stop called Community. And it was a place that church groups went to, school groups went to, Susan B. Anthony went to. It was very, very well known. So everybody also knew what they were doing there, wink, wink. But they also wanted to see it for themselves.

14:41This was one of the things that was really fascinating to me because this was taking place in Victorian America. And this was a time when Americans, we thought, were so prudish that you couldn't even say the word underwear. You would have to say inexpressibles. So that was what was happening on the surface. But below that, there was a tremendous amount of ferment and alternative living. How far were people coming to become members of the community? I mean, were these mainly local people, or was word of this community spreading? Word of the community definitely spread across the country through their newspaper and their annual report.

15:21And a good example of a member who came from rather far afield was Charles Julius Gouteau. Charles Julius Gouteau started writing to Oneida when he was 19. He was in school in Michigan and failing. He was unhappy. He heard about John Humphrey Noyes and his connection to God. Charles Gouteau thought he might be special too. He said that he felt drawn to Oneida by an irresistible power. Charles Gouteau had a maniacally inflated ego, and he aspired to take John Humphrey Noyes' place as leader of the community, and he also said that he should be president of the United States. After four months of writing letters, Charles Gouteau was able to convince Oneida to let him join the community.

16:12He traveled from Michigan to New York. When he joined the Oneida community, they immediately recognized that he was an oddball. He hated, absolutely hated physical labor. And his biggest beef with the Oneida community was that the women didn't want anything to do with him, and they called him, get out. They also had a practice called mutual criticism, which was pretty brutal. they would criticize one of the residents in a group meeting about their behavior, about their personality, their character, as brutal as possible. And they had a lot to say about Charles Couteau, and he felt like he was being crucified.

16:57Interestingly, the only person who was not subject to mutual criticism was John Humphrey Noyes, of course, because he was perfect. Charles Couteau began to have doubts about his future at Oneida. He realized that the community would never see his connection to God or treat him like a leader. But he decided there might still be a way for him to make a name for himself. Newspapers were like the Internet of the day. And newspapers had exploded since the 1830s. Since he started The Perfectionist, John Humphrey Noyce had expanded his newspaper business. He'd even set up a publishing office in Brooklyn, staffed by Oneida community members.

17:42Noyes wanted to distribute a daily religious paper. And Charles Gatteau copied whatever John Humphrey Noyes said. So it became Charles Gatteau's ambition also to create a theocratic daily newspaper. Even though he was in his early 20s, he had no experience as a writer or editor, but he was determined and 100 % believed that he could get this off the ground because he was in the employ of Jesus Christ and company. And through the power of God's inspiration, he was bound to succeed. Charles Gouteau wrote, Oneida was very uncongenial to my literary ambitions and paralyzing to my brain. He decided to leave the community.

18:31On April 3, 1865, Charles Gouteau snuck away from the Oneida Mansion House. Just days later, on April 14, John Wilkes Booth entered a theater in Washington, D.C. He stood behind the president, Abraham Lincoln, and shot him in the head. When a congressman in Ohio named James Garfield heard about the president's murder, he wrote, I can hardly think or write or speak. He said, I do not believe it is in the American character to become assassins. Sixteen years later, that congressman, James Garfield, became the second president to be assassinated. Shot by Charles Gouteau. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

19:30We'll be right back.

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21:27James Garfield was born in Ohio in the wilderness. He came from an impoverished background. He didn't go to school until he was 17. James Garfield's father died when he was still a toddler. His mother raised him and his three siblings in a log cabin in the woods. Susan Wells writes that growing up, Garfield hated working outside. He preferred books. He was very moody. He was embarrassed by the fact that he had been raised in poverty. And he was very insecure and self-conscious. He was kind of depressive. But he really wanted to have a life, as he said, with thunder in it. When James Garfield finally started school at 17, he did well.

22:18He was a great scholar. He was a great speaker. He was just a great guy. He would slap you on the back. He was tall, beefy, and athletic, and serious, and very charming. James Garfield was so admired at his school that after he graduated from college, he came back to be its principal. He worked another job, too. At 28, Garfield was elected as Ohio's youngest state senator. Susan Wells says he attracted attention. Well, he was, as I say, very charming, very attractive, tall. He had a big head of sandy hair. He had a big head, bright blue eyes. And he loved women, and they loved him. He did get married in 1852, but he admitted that fidelity did not come easily or naturally to him.

23:11He married a woman named Lucretia Rudolph, known as Crete to her friends. They met his classmates. They were two of the best students at the school. He married her, but he immediately had doubts about that. And he told her that he felt that he died daily after they were married, which is a horrible thing to say. That's really bad. I mean, it really doesn't get much worse than that. In 1861, the Civil War started. James Garfield fought several battles in the war. He spent a lot of time traveling around the country. He often got sick. He needed female companionship, and he found it in this cross-dressing union spy named Pauline Cushman.

23:56Pauline Cushman was a fake name, of reference to a famous actor, Charlotte Cushman, who was known for playing both male and female roles. Pauline dressed as different characters to spy on the Confederacy. In Louisville, she pretended to be a Southern gentleman, playing billiards and drinking brandy to collect information. In Tennessee, she dressed as a Confederate woman looking for help after she'd been run out of her home. Undercover, Pauline Cushman was able to visit several Confederate headquarters and memorize their defense plans. But she was eventually captured and kept prisoner. When she was later freed by Union soldiers, she was very sick.

24:44James Garfield rushed to her side. She called him one of her most constant companions. It was James Garfield who convinced Abraham Lincoln to give Pauline Cushman an honorary title of major. Months later, James Garfield was called home. His three-year-old daughter, who was named Eliza, but they called Trott, was sick. She died in early December, 1863. Susan Wells writes that before they buried Trott, James Garfield asked a photographer to take a memorial family portrait. They didn't have many, from when she was alive. In the photo, he's holding Trott in his lap, looking down at her face. After the Civil War ended, James Garfield worked as a lawyer.

25:37He and Lucretia had six more children, though they lost one more as a baby. He was elected and re-elected a congressman for Ohio nine times. He had another affair with a young journalist. In 1880, James Garfield was elected to the U.S. Senate, but he never had a chance to serve. Because, as Susan Wells puts it, he became the accidental nominee for president. He was at the Republican convention in 1880 as a floor manager. He was nominating somebody else, another Ohioan, for the presidency. But as James Garfield gave his speech for the other candidate, people started voting to nominate him instead.

26:24Susan Wells writes that he was stunned and tried to protest the votes, but was interrupted by cheers and people chanting his own name. There was a movement, a groundswell from the floor to draft Garfield as a dark horse candidate, as someone everybody liked and could agree on. And that's what happened.

26:48Since he'd left Oneida, Charles Gouteau hadn't found much success in the newspaper business, or any kind of business. He'd tried for a while to be a traveling preacher. He wrote a book called The Truth, which copied all of John Humphrey Noyes' ideas. On the road, he avoided paying for hotels by claiming he worked for Jesus Christ and company, and then running away. How does Charles Gouteau involve himself with Garfield and Garfield's campaign? Well, interestingly, the first campaign that Gouteau involved himself in was the presidential campaign of Horace Greeley in 1872. Horace Greeley was a publishing mogul.

27:35He started the New York Tribune, and in 1872, he ran for president against Ulysses S. Grant. Charles Gouteau decided he wanted to get into politics. He obsessively wrote and revised a campaign speech for Horace Greeley. Greeley never asked for it. But his campaign did end up giving Charles Gouteau permission to give the speech at some rallies in New York City. Gouteau believed that if he worked on Greeley's presidential campaign and Greeley went to the White House, then Guiteau was sure he would be rewarded with appointment as a foreign minister. But then Greeley lost. And he used that same template in 1880 when James Garfield ran for president.

28:24Guiteau rewrote that speech for Greeley as a speech for James Garfield with the same expectation that he would be rewarded for that campaign work with an appointment as a foreign minister. But James Garfield had never heard of Charles Gouteau. Gouteau traveled around on his own to deliver the speech. Then James Garfield won the presidency, and Charles Gouteau went to Washington, D.C. to meet him. This was a time when the White House was open to the public. So Gouteau was in the lobby, and one day he was actually ushered into Garfield's office and he handed him a copy of his speech and had written on it, Minister to Paris, and left it in Garfield's hands.

29:14And Garfield must have been completely bewildered by that situation. But he was very present in the White House. The staff saw him day after day after day. What makes Gouteau want to kill James Garfield? Gouteau finally decided to remove James Garfield from the presidency because, first of all, he was disappointed that he was not being appointed as a minister to Paris. But mostly at that moment, there was a war in the Republican Party. The party was divided into fighting factions. And Garfield was representing one faction while Gouteau had affiliated himself with another faction. And he just believed that Garfield was standing in the way of unifying the Republican Party, and that if he removed Garfield, the Republican Party would become united and everything would be happy.

30:28So that had a lot to do with why he decided to shoot the president. Charles Gouteau bought a pistol. He had bought a bulldog revolver, which he didn't know how to use, but he practiced it on an abandoned canal in Washington. It was a small gun designed to fit into a coat pocket. Charles Couteau chose one with an ivory handle because, as Susan Wells put it, he wanted it worthy to be preserved for history. We'll be right back. Thank you.

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