An Assassin in Utopia
The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President's Murder
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3.4 • 18 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This true crime odyssey explores a forgotten, astonishing chapter of American history, leading the reader from a free-love community in upstate New York to the shocking assassination of President James Garfield.
It was heaven on earth—and, some whispered, the devil’s garden.
Thousands came by trains and carriages to see this new Eden, carved from hundreds of acres of wild woodland. They marveled at orchards bursting with fruit, thick herds of Ayrshire cattle and Cotswold sheep, and whizzing mills. They gaped at the people who lived in this place—especially the women, with their queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts. The men and women of this strange outpost worked and slept together—without sin, they claimed.
From 1848 to 1881, a small utopian colony in upstate New York—the Oneida Community—was known for its shocking sexual practices, from open marriage and free love to the sexual training of young boys by older women. And in 1881, a one-time member of the Oneida Community—Charles Julius Guiteau—assassinated President James Garfield in a brutal crime that shook America to its core.
An Assassin in Utopia is the first book that weaves together these explosive stories in a tale of utopian experiments, political machinations, and murder. This deeply researched narrative—by bestselling author Susan Wels—tells the true, interlocking stories of the Oneida Community and its radical founder, John Humphrey Noyes; his idol, the eccentric newspaper publisher Horace Greeley (founder of the New Yorker and the New York Tribune); and the gloomy, indecisive President James Garfield—who was assassinated after his first six months in office.
Juxtaposed to their stories is the odd tale of Garfield’s assassin, the demented Charles Julius Guiteau, who was connected to all of them in extraordinary, surprising ways.
Against a vivid backdrop of ambition, hucksterism, epidemics, and spectacle, the book’s interwoven stories fuse together in the climactic murder of President Garfield in 1881—at the same time as the Oneida Community collapsed.
Colorful and compelling, An Assassin in Utopia is a page-turning odyssey through America’s nineteenth-century cultural and political landscape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wels (Titanic: Legacy of the World's Greatest Ocean Liner) centers this intriguing and sprawling survey of late 19th-century America on the Oneida Community, an agrarian society founded by John Humphrey Noyes and based on his religious beliefs and free love. The commune was the first place in the U.S. to experiment with eugenics, with Noyes selectively choosing who among his disciples could breed. The community collapsed after Noyes fled to Canada ahead of a statutory rape charge; he died there in 1886. One narrative thread follows President Garfield's assassin, Charles Guiteau, who briefly lived at Oneida before becoming an unstable drifter whose obsession with politics led to his murderous turn. Along the way, Wels touches on the career of newsman Horace Greeley, the country's fascination with P.T. Barnum's Greatest Show on Earth, the rage for mediums and spiritualism, the dirty presidential politics of the era, and a rift in the Republican party. The title is somewhat misleading, as Guiteau's story constitutes a relatively small portion of the whole, but American history buffs will find much else of interest. Fans of Candice Millard's work will want to have a look.
Customer Reviews
If I could I would give this book six stars.
Fast paced, fun, and entertaining. This is a well written
political and social history of the 19th century.