Damask

 

The annals of Fourier’s western utopias are incomplete.  Records were either lost, or, perhaps, destroyed by disappointed disciples.  However, some chronicles relating to Damask, a phalanx founded on Fourier’s principles in the Oregon territory, remain extant. 

Charles Fourier was a French thinker.  He died in 1837, but his ideas remained influential long after that time.  Fourier believed that the ideal human society would consist of loosely allied “phalanxes” – that is self-sustaining communes consisting of 1620 inhabitants.  (The population of the phalanx would consist of all possible personality types as defined by Fourier in various combinations suitable to the industry in which the commune engaged.)  People would live in hotel-like phalansteries consisting of four floors: the rich would occupy the top and the poorest members were to live at ground level.  At these communes, labor would become pleasure.  There would be free love and, ultimately, the world would be organized into six million peaceful phalanxes in loose alliance with one another under the leadership of an Omniarch.  When perfect harmony was achieved, the North Pole would melt and the Arctic Ocean would become as warm as the Mediterranean and the seas would no longer be salt – instead the water would become a kind of lemonade popular in Paris in first half of the 19th century and called limonade a cedre.  

Records show that colonists in the first Damask expedition left St. Louis is the early Spring of 1850.  Each traveler was allotted a ration of water and, also, several bottles of restorative tea brewed with herbs imported from South America.  The tea was intoxicating and its consumption in small amounts reduced fatigue, eliminated pain, and made the traveler drinking the brew energetic and jovial.  But, in large quantities, the tea had aphrodisiac effects and caused mania.  

The colonist’s wagons were laden with potted mulberry trees as well as crates of fruit from which orchards could be planted.  Cocoons were to be seeded in the mulberry trees and the phalanx was organized to produce silk.  A herd of sheep followed the wagon train.  The name of the phalanx was Damask, identifying a textile comprised of silk woven with wool.  Because of the utopia’s planned industry, the colonists were selected according to insect and herd-animal personality types.  In the leader’s wagon, index cards identifying the character traits of each colonist and his or her sexual preferences were kept in a locked red trunk.

In the western great basin, between ranges of distant snow-capped mountains, the social experiment collapsed.  Some of the colonists imprudently consumed all of their restorative tea and demanded that they receive rations from those who had been more frugal in their use of the beverage.  Evidently, the tea had addictive qualities: women prostituted themselves for it and men fought over bottles of the stuff.  Finally, it was determined that the remaining stores of the tea would be confiscated by the leader and shared-out among all members of the expedition.  But those hoarding the tea fought to retain its possession and several men were killed.  At last, the leader enlisted the help of military dragoons in the territory and the remaining bottles of the brew were gathered at his wagon and, then, accused of fomenting dissension, poured out onto the hard, baked desert soil.  That night, someone set afire several of the wagons and there was a riot.  The precious mulberry saplings were dumped out of their pots and the fruits crushed and destroyed.  The blaze frightened the sheep and they went astray in the stony badlands.  The hot sun wilted the leaves of the mulberry trees and birds flocked to devour the silkworms and their cocoons strewn across the desert.

The survivors of the ill-fated expedition to Damask limped back to St. Louis.  When another expedition to the Oregon territory was planned, everyone agreed that the tea brewed from the Peruvian herbs should not be sent with the pioneers.  Indeed, after a few years, the recipe for brewing the marvelous tea was lost and, in any event, its ingredients could no longer be found. M (The phalanxes around Cusco had all failed and no longer existed.)  On this expedition, barrels of water were under the strict command of the leader who also controlled all rations distributed to the settlers.  A dozen mounted police, refugees from military service, were deployed to protect the water, food, and the mulberry seedlings, as well as the silkworms necessary for the phalanx’s sericulture.  Advance agents to the northwest determined that sheep could be purchased in abundance there from the incumbent settlers and so, on this expedition, herd-animals did not accompany the pioneers.

These measures proved successful and the colonists reached the gorges of the Columbia in the Fall of 1856.  Some stone buildings were erected and a cocoonery, as it was called, was established.  The phalanx dormitories were built in the shadow of a craggy mountain and, as a result, the sun did not shine down onto the phalanstery until mid-day or, even, later depending upon the season of the year.  The gloom prevailing in the phalanstery was thought to be insalubrious and so the colony was moved onto a sunny plateau where, however, water was scarce.  Nonetheless, the colonists were industrious, built brick-lined channels to direct rivulets of snow-melt to their orchards, and, for a decade, their social experiment flourished.  Inevitably, some of the orchards were more productive than others and disputes arose about the division of produce.  These controversies proved to be intractable and, so, after much deliberation, each family was provided its own allotment to farm as it deemed proper.  People moved out of the phalanstery and the big stone structure was used as a quarry for the farmhouses built in the area.  Until recently, some knee-high stone walls were still visible – all that remained of the dormitories where the colonists had once lived.  A new highway eradicated these remains and, now, the only traces of Damask on the high, barren plateau are a few stands of ancient and shriveled mulberry trees.