Paradise Now

THE SHAKERS

American Zion

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

WILLIAM BLAKE

Cottonopolis

Ann Lee was born four decades before the Dark Day, on Leap Day 1736. She was the second of eight children born to a Manchester blacksmith named John Lees and a woman whose name is lost to history. They lived in a small apartment on Toad Lane, a narrow street of smithies and alehouses.

In the mid-1700s, Manchester was ground zero for the nascent Industrial Revolution. When Lee was little, the blocks of the city were interspersed with small farm plots. Shiploads of cheap, slave-picked American cotton and a handful of technical innovations transformed the city. By the time Lee was a young woman, Manchester had begun to fill with unskilled workers from the countryside looking for work in the new mills. The invention of the spinning jenny, a machine that allowed one person to operate many yarn spindles at once, revolutionized the production of thread. Spinning, which had formerly been done by independent artisans or in the evenings by farmers wives, became a profitable full-time trade. The jennies spun a surplus of thread, accelerating advances in weaving technology. Groups of wealthy landowners built large mills where water- and steam-driven looms churned out inexpensive cloth. Artisan weavers and spinners could not compete. Many sold their small plots of ancestral land and joined the exodus into the city. Peasants who had previously fed themselves from their own meager acreage and often didn t eat much at all began to live off factory wages.

Little is known of Lee s early life. She never went to school. When she was eight, she began to work on a loom. The hagiography written by her followers after her death offers a portrait of their prophet as a severe young woman. The plump little girl relished hard work, the official record reports, and was never addicted to play as other children. From an early age she was impressed

Chris Jennings grew up in New York City. He graduated from Deep Springs College and Wesleyan University. He lives in Northern California with his dog.

Uncommonly smart and beautifully written . . . [Chris] Jennings s sure grasp never falters. The result is a triumph of scholarship and narration: five stand-alone community studies and a coherent, often spellbinding history of the United States during its tumultuous first half-century. . . . Although never less than evenhanded, and sometimes deliciously wry, Jennings writes with obvious affection for his subjects. To read Paradise Now is to be dazzled, humbled and occasionally flabbergasted by the amount of energy and talent sacrificed at utopia s altar. But then, as Jennings so memorably puts it, Anyone nuts enough to try building heaven on earth is bound for a hell of his own making. The New York Times Book Review
 
Writing an impartial, respectful account of these philanthropies and follies is no small task, but Mr. Jennings largely pulls it off with insight and aplomb. Indulgently sympathetic to the utopian impulse in general, he tells a good story. His explanations of the various reformist credos are patient, thought-provoking and . . . entertaining. The Wall Street Journal

Thoughtful, measured, and surprisingly relevant. Chicago Tribune

As a tour guide, Jennings is thoughtful, engaging and witty in the right doses. . . . He makes the subject his own with fresh eyes and a crisp narrative, rich with detail. . . . In the end, Jennings writes, the communards disregard for the world as it exists sealed their fate. But in revisiting their stories, he makes a compelling case that our present-day deficit of imagination could be similarly fated. San Francisco Chronicle

Chris Jennings is a natural storyteller, and his Paradise Now, a five-part chronicle of America s nineteenth-century utopian dreamers and doers, is the most clear-eyed, sympathetic, and inspiring account I ve read of this vital chapter in American history in decades. What sort of future did they want? The Shakers, Owenites, Fourierists,