Looming over Susan Wels’s “An Assassin in Utopia” are two men steered by their own contrarian compasses—John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida religious community and coiner of the term “free love,” and Charles Guiteau, onetime Oneidan and eventual assassin of President James Garfield. In this crowded volume, Ms. Wels, who has previously written books on the Titanic and Pearl Harbor, dips into the personal and social forces that drove both of these peculiar men. She also packs in a host of other 19th-century notables, including spiritualists, politicians, newspaper publisher Horace Greeley and professional huckster P.T. Barnum. A crammed curio-cabinet of a book, “An Assassin in Utopia” offers an engaging glimpse of the times.
John Humphrey Noyes was born in 1811 in Brattleboro, Vt., son of John Noyes, a businessman-politician, and Polly Hayes Noyes, aunt of Rutherford B. Hayes, who in 1877 would become the 19th president. Intellectually precocious but painfully shy, John Humphrey studied at Dartmouth College and planned to enter the law, before being swept up in the great religious revival seizing the country in the 1830s.
His fervor led him to Yale Divinity School, where his unconventional beliefs, including the conviction that he was perfect and free from sin, nearly resulted in his expulsion. A few years later, after romancing a woman who chose another suitor, Noyes began to preach for an end to marriage and sexual exclusivity. “In a holy community,” he wrote, “there is no more reason why sexual intercourse shall be restrained by law than why eating and drinking should be, and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other.”
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