| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

W. Fitzhugh Brundage. A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894–1901. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 1996. Pp. xi, 263. Cloth $38.95, paper $16.95.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage's first work, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (1993), won the Merle Curti Award from the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American social history in 1994. In his latest work, he has turned away from that dark subject to examine a progressive colony, the Ruskin Colony, that was planted in Tennessee in the 1890s. Ruskin has had its historians before (Howard H. Quint) and a notable place in radical and labor history, but Brundage is the first to explore the details of its inner life, the intellectual forces that shaped its founders and the deeper reasons for its failure to establish a lasting community or to influence the course of American socialism. 1

The Ruskin Colony's origins are found in the socialist movement of the early 1890s that tried to reverse the tide of American industrial development and replace it with a social program based on a political and social ethic that brought riches to the many rather than the few. The spearhead behind the colony project was the publicist/journalist Julius Augustus Wayland, who promoted it in the pages of his paper, The Coming Nation. The scheme attracted settlers who had been hard hit by the 1893 depression. Ruskin's location in the South (first in Tennessee, then in Georgia) set it apart from earlier utopian colonies established in the North and Midwest. The vision of a utopia drenched in sun (so they imagined) proved a lure to northern workers left out in the cold. . . .

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