Toward a Socialist History: Utopian Communities in Texas

Folko Mueller

To avoid the Confederate draft, a group of German men fled to Union-held New Orleans but were caught and killed near the Nueces River, 1862. Lithograph of funeral, Comfort, TX. Harpers Weekly, 9/20/1865.

IF YOU WERE to take a Texas History class, you would most likely hear about apparently larger-than-life characters like Stephen F. Austin and Sam Houston, and events like the Texas war of independence, including the epic Battle of the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto, and, of course, the discovery of oil at Spindletop, which started the Texas Oil Boom.

In essence, you would be taught why everything in Texas is supposedly bigger and better, and how it is an exceptional state in a country that is already deemed exceptional.

If we dig a little deeper, we do find an alternative history. This history includes quite a few settlers who weren’t all that different either from their friends or families in the Old World, or other settlers of the New, with regards to their struggles and aspirations.

These communal experiments, however consciously or not, were inevitably part of the colonial settlement of Indigenous lands whose peoples had their own longstanding cultures and social structures. As discussed below, in some cases they interacted and established treaty relations with the Native American nations. In other cases they appeared to have no knowledge of or interest in the peoples dispossessed in the overall settlement and U.S. expansion process.

These settlers did not want to replicate the order of the world which they just left (usually under duress), but they also had an alternative vision for a future society.

Their approaches towards realizing this vision ranged from initially forming primitive communitarian societies shaped by the ideas of utopian socialism, to taking a principled stance against slavery and secession in a Confederate State, to later becoming involved in labor, social and at times even electoral struggles, which would include trade union organizing as well as political clubs and parties.

Socialist ideas, while continuously being portrayed as somehow un- or-anti-American, have been part of the political and social fabric of this country for a long time. Texas is no exception.

Some of the very first communistic societies were formed by settlers in the middle of the 19th century, right around the time Texas was granted statehood. We can therefore say that socialist ideas have been prevalent in the state of Texas since its inception.

Much whitewashing of course has been occurring since then, in particular after World War II when anti-communist hysteria was at its height during the repressive McCarthy era. Since the fall of the Stalinized USSR and its satellite states, the term “socialism” may have become more acceptable to a new generation of scholars and activists — but not necessarily perceived as a vision that once had a mass following in this country.

I propose to somewhat remedy this situation in showing that socialist ideas are as American as apple pie. This article focuses specifically on the rise and decline of Texas utopian communist societies.

Utopian Socialism and Emigrant Roots

An early example was the community of Bettina founded in 1847, west of Fredericksburg in Gillespie County. It was named after Bettina von Arnim, a German literary figure and social visionary of the Romantic era. Ironically, German noblemen who had founded an Adelsverein (nobility club) to promote German colonization in Texas, played a role in bringing it about.(1)

While emigrants leaving their homeland for America were at first being blamed for godless behavior and adventurism, the sheer size of the exodus caused a shift in German public opinion. From the 1840s on, charity organizations sprung up all over Germany to try and help emigrants.

State authorities removed barriers and abolished special taxes for emigrants. At the same time an organizational network that would facilitate moving abroad came into being. Emigration societies that experimented with group migration and settlement emerged.

The Texas Adelsverein was the most famous of these. Its goals can be summarized as follows:

a) Assistance and protection for immigrants.
b) The founding of a colony of settlers in America.
c) Elimination of a dangerous potential for social unrest and revolution.
d) New activity for members of the nobility who had lost their sovereign rights in the early 19th century political reforms, and a financial profit for the members of the society.(2)

The Commissioner General of the Adelsverein, Prince Solms was trying to recruit members of a communistic fraternity of freethinkers by telling them “…that there was no demand in the Old Country for all the professional men whom universities were turning out, and they must find a new and developing country where their services would be in demand.”

No doubt remained after their meeting with Prince Solms that the place to seek their ideal community was Texas — “a land of milk and honey, of perennial flowers, of crystal streams, rich and fruitful beyond measure, where roamed myriads of deer and buffalo while the primeval forests abounded in wild fowl of every kind.”

Known as “The Society of Forty” from the size of their membership, the fraternity had chapters at Darmstadt, Giessen and Heidelberg.(3) Students were allotted $12,000 in financial backing along with livestock, equipment and provisions to sustain the project for the first year. The commune selected “friendship, freedom, equality” as its motto and advocated “no regular scheme of government.”(4)

John O. Meusebach

In 1845 Solms was replaced by the far more impactful Baron Ottfried Hans von Meusebach, or John O. Meusebach as he became known as in Texas after renouncing his blueblood ancestry. Meusebach personally knew Bettina von Arnim, who introduced him to a liberal elite of German intellectuals known as the Berlin Circle, while he was living in Prussia’s capital.

The political views of this circle were far ahead of their times in ultra-conservative Prussia. A shared concern of this group was that the policies of Prince von Metternich (the German-born Austrian diplomat and key figure of the Vienna Congress of 1815) had closed the door on liberalism and nationalism, including in Germany, in order to maintain the dominant conservative role of the Hapsburg empire.

The single most famous act of Meusebach in Texas was to broker a treaty with Native American plains tribes, in particular the Comanches, in order to gain access to the more fertile lands of the Texas Hill Country. This peace treaty was never broken, and was thus indicative of an approach that differed vastly from that of the majority of Anglo-settlers, often leading either to broken treaties or outright violent confrontations between settlers and the Indigenous nations.

Buffalo-Hump with his family.

In Meusebach’s case, rights to a land grant from the Republic of Texas between the Llano and Colorado rivers, originally dating from 1842, had been sold to the Adelsverein. As the land grant stated that the territory had to be at least partially surveyed and settled by 1847, incursions into Native American territory became a necessity.

These began on January 22, 1847. Contacts were made, and over the course of several sessions a peace treaty was reached in March of 1847 between Meusebach and representatives of the Penateka Comanches, including head chiefs Buffalo Hump and Santa Anna (Santana).

The treaty allowed Meusebach’s settlers to go unharmed into Native territory and the Native Americans to go to the white settlements; promised mutual reports on wrongdoing; and provided for survey of lands in the San Saba area with a payment of at least $1,000 to the Indians.

The Treaty remains one of the few pacts between settlers and Native Americans that was never broken.(5)

Experiments and Failures

It was in this region that Bettina was founded. Sadly, the social experiment was short-lived. Although the commune members had a quite diversified skill set ranging from physicians to carpenters, none possessed the practical skills needed to clear virgin land for settlement.

Bettina collapsed within a year, primarily due to its members’ lack of frontier experience. The fact that the Adelsverein went bankrupt, which in essence cut the settlers off from financial aid, did not help either.(6)

Little is known regarding the interactions of the Bettina commune with the outside world. Given what we do know about the project’s financial dependence on the Adelsverein, its internal strife and short life span, we can assume that outside interaction was probably limited. But since it failed to be self-sufficient as initially planned, there must have been some trade.

There are no records, as far as I am aware, that would indicate any proselytizing or other ideological engagement with the outside world.

Another attempt at establishing a communistic society on Texas soil was made the same year Bettina failed, in 1848, by a group of primarily French utopian socialists known as “The Icarians.” The original tenets of the Icarians were based on the pillars of the French Revolution: “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

This group was led by Étienne Cabet, a French philosopher who wrote a history of the July Revolution of 1830, in which he had actively participated. He was also a leader of a secret revolutionary society known as the Carbonari, a member of French legislature; and established his own newspaper.(7)

Due to his bitter attacks on the government, Cabet was accused of treason, condemned to two years of prison, and forced to flee the country. While in exile in England he fell under the influence of Robert Owen and wrote a utopian novel, Icaria, about a fictional country and society.

The success of his book prompted him to take steps to realize his vision. In 1839 he returned to France to advocate a communitarian social movement, which he termed communisme.

By 1848 Cabet gave up on reforming French society but looked at the United States to set up Icaria. More specifically, he set sail from Le Havre for the Red River Country in Texas. In the end, however, Texas did not prove the utopia Cabet and his followers were looking for.(8)

Sixty-nine persons formed the advance guard of his first settlement in Texas. They were ravaged by yellow fever, and by the time Cabet arrived in New Orleans with a second band the first was already disorganized; about one third of the colonists returned to France.

The remainder of his followers moved first to a site in Nauvoo, Illinois that had recently been vacated by Mormons, and finally established an “Icaria” near modern-day Corning, Iowa.

This final move followed factional splits, in large part caused by Cabet’s increasingly dictatorial leadership. He died shortly afterward but the Corning Icaria did not disband until 1898. It existed for 46 years, making it the longest non-religious communal living experiment in American history.(6), (7), (8)

While interaction with the outside world at the original Icarian settlement in Texas was minimal due to the harsh conditions encountered by the original wave of colonists and the extremely short life of the settlement, the final Corning settlement had extensive networks.

The settlement became known as quite an attraction on the Mormon Trail west, where one could find respite from the road in exchange for simple labor. “Visitors were quite frequent in Icaria,” wrote Marie Marchand Ross, a child of the colony, in her 1938 memoir. “They were of all kinds — cranks, students of French or students of economics, … reporters from neighboring towns or cities, and even persons from abroad.”(9)

Also predominantly French-speaking was the socialist utopian community of La Réunion, formed in 1855 by French, Belgian and Swiss Colonists near the forks of the Trinity River, now part of Dallas.(10)

It was founded by Victor Prosper Considerant, one of the leading democratic socialist figures in France during the revolutionary period of 1830-1850 and international leader of the Fourierist movement.

Victor Prosper Considerant (A. Collette).

Considerant’s participation in a failed insurrection against Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) forced him into exile in Belgium in 1849. By 1853 he was in North Texas, following an invitation by an American utopian socialist and Fourier popularizer, Albert Brisbane.

Considerant believed that capitalism could be coaxed into changing by providing good examples of functional socialist enterprises. He planned the colony to be a loosely structured communal experiment administered by a system of direct democracy. Participants would share in the profits according to a formula based on the amount of capital investment and the quantity and quality of labor performed.

While Considerant’s plans for experimental communities were tried in many places in Europe and America, none of them proved economically viable. Many of the Europeans, however, stayed after their original settlements had collapsed. They made great contributions in the sparsely settled areas where they raised families, including becoming professors and mayors.(11)

Massacre

The Civil War put an end to all the Texas communities. One incident, known as the Nueces massacre, is indicative of the extremely oppressive nature of Civil War-era Texas. Due to the strong pro-Union and anti-slavery sentiment of the German Texan population, the Confederate States of America imposed martial law on Central Texas in 1862. Many Germans set out to flee Texas after two of their peers were executed by a Confederate expedition into the Hill Country; they wanted to avoid the Confederate draft.

One such group was trying to head to Union-controlled New Orleans via Mexico. A Confederate group pursued, and after six days, caught up with them, as the Germans made camp by the Nueces River.

What turned this event, also known as the “Battle of the Nueces,” into a war crime is that after the initial fight ended, nine wounded Germans were not taken prisoner but summarily executed.

Another party of Germans that had fled the field was chased down by Confederate cavalrymen and killed in cold blood before they could cross the Rio Grande.(12)

Prefigurative Politics and Limitations

In summary, we can identify a number of issues that form a common thread across the three communes, which ultimately lead to their demise. These included no or at best very limited, knowledge of agriculture; harsh conditions of frontier life combined with adverse weather, lack of funds. and infighting.

However, there is also a common denom­inator that has to do with the commune model per se, which is one of prefigurative politics.

“Prefigurative politics” refers to a political orientation based on the premise that the ends that a social movement achieves are fundamentally shaped by the means it employs, and that movements should therefore do their best to choose means that embody or “prefigure” the kind of society they want to bring about.(13)

In practice, they involve building a new society “within the shell of the old” by living out the values and social structures the group desires for the future.

We don’t know for sure whether the commune members ever intended to bring about any larger societal change, but none of the communes had any significant social base outside the community to begin to think or act on such efforts.

In the end, these utopian socialist communities could probably be also described as libertarian socialist. A sort of Ur-libertarianism provided an environment for a free and egalitarian lifestyle, while features of anarchism where at the very least present at La Réunion, where commune members were self-governed via direct democracy.

They were contemporaries of Marx, but we don’t know if the commune members read or would have had access to some of his writings. What we do know is that The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, the same year that Bettina failed and Icaria was first established. In chapter 3 of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels provide their critique of utopian socialists:

“The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

“Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.”

They go on to say:

“The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects.”

In The Peasant War, published two years later, Engels chose a much more reconciliatory tone, writing that “German theoretical socialism will never forget that it rests on the shoulders of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen — three men who, in spite of all their fantastic notions and all their utopianism, stand among the most eminent thinkers of all time…”(14)

Today’s revolutionary socialists, with the benefit of hindsight, the example of the October Revolution of 1917, and access to an abundance of Marxist analysis, would argue that the commune efforts were bound to fail since they were not grounded in the material conditions of existing society. They remind us, however, that the vision of an egalitarian, non-exploitative future is not alien to American history.

Notes

1. Irene Marschall King: John O.Meusebach, University of Texas Press, 1966.
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2. Theodore Gish and Richard Spuler (eds.): Eagle in the New World — German Immigration to Texas and America, Texas A&M University Press, College Station, Texas, 1986.
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3. Glen E. Lich: The German Texans, The University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio, 1996.
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4. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/schleicher-gustav
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5. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/meusebach-comanche-treaty
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6. Charles Nordhoff: The Communistic Societies of the United States, Hillary House Publishers Ltd., New York, 1960.
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7. Christopher H. Johnson, Marcel van der Linden (ed.): Etienne Cabet and the Icarian Movement in France and the United States, The Cambridge History of Socialism, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
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8. Randall J. Soland: “Utopian Communities of Illinois: Heaven on the Prairie,” The History Press, Charleston, SC, 2017.
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9. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-19th-century-novel-that-inspired-a-communist-utopia-on-the-american-frontier-icarians-180983302/
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10. https:// www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/la-reunion
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11. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/considerant-victor-prosper
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12. https:// www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/nueces-battle-of-the
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13. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470674871.wbespm167.pub2
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14. Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, 1874, Adddendum to the Preface of the 1820 edition. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/
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November-December 2025, ATC 239