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Robert Owen’s New Harmony

Back in the day on April 27th, 1825, Robert Owen delivered his initial address to the settlers of his communalist experiment in New Harmony, Indiana. The socialist pioneer had started his adult life as a successful entrepreneur in Manchester, England’s textile industry. After purchasing a cotton mill in Scotland, Owen attempted to humanize working conditions by instituting reforms that could be considered, for their day, ‘revolutionary,’ even if paternalist. Continually disillusioned by the ills spawned by the social order of industrialization and the indifference shown to them by British capitalists, Owen turned to the United States to start a new egalitarian community. After purchasing land in Indiana, the utopian renamed it “New Harmony.” Inaugurating the social experiment, Owen assailed selfish individualism and called for a transition of values likening the community to a “halfway house” on a “new journey from poverty to wealth, from ignorance to intelligence, from anxiety to satisfaction of the mind.”

New Harmony lasted all of three years before coming to an end.

For Uprising, this is your truth professa’ saying it’s no mystery why they conceal our people’s history