Free Republic

When the Pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower, they set up a society in which no one could own property and everyone shared equally, no matter how much work they did. The result was misery and hunger. But when the governor allowed each man to plant and raise crops for his own household, something amazing happened. William Bradford recorded the experiences of the Separatists who came to the New World on the Mayflower and later voyages some years after the events actually occurred. His memory was evidently aided by personal letters that had been retained as well as his own contemporary...

History: Orderville's utopia was nearly perfect -- for about a decade

SEATTLE - In this day and age where people rarely know their next door neighbor, a movement is afoot to create consciously connected communities of people who actually want to be involved in the lives of their neighbors. It’s called cohousing – and it’s already here in Western Washington. According to the Web site www.cohousing.org, the concept originated in Denmark, and was promoted in the United States by architects Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett in the early 1980s. The Danish concept of “living community” has spread quickly. Worldwide, there are now hundreds of cohousing communities, expanding from Denmark into the...

Barack Obama summed up well the perversity of Democratic Party thinking when he told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that it is "neighborliness" for Washington to hike taxes on those who are "sitting pretty." Joe Biden, followed up last week with the observation that it's "patriotic" for the country's highest earners to pay more in taxes. O'Reilly was right to point out to Obama that the senator is supporting a "socialist tenet" with his "neighborly" comment earlier this month. But a reminder of the facts isn't likely to change the Democratic candidate's inveterate stance. This is the man who told ABC's...

STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. -- Two men who took fruit and vegetables out of a garbage can have been sentenced to six months in jail, a punishment they say is harsh and the only choice they had to avoid a felony on their records. Giles Charle, 24, of Sumersworth, N.H., and David Siller, 27, of Wayne, Pa., were on their way to the Rainbow Family's annual gathering when they were arrested in June and charged with felony burglary and misdemeanor theft. Authorities said they took five cucumbers, four or five apricots, two bundles of asparagus spears and a handful of cherries...

Oaks is experiencing a midlife crisis. The Virginia commune supported its throwback hippie lifestyle for more than 38 years by selling hammocks and tofu. But in 2004, Twin Oaks lost one of its biggest hammock customers, Pier 1 Imports (Research). Last year revenues slipped to $1.1 million from a 2000 peak of more than $2 million. And expenses such as gas and health care for the commune's aging population are climbing fast. "I hoped we would be financially secure by now," says founder Kat Kinkade, 75. "We're not." Kinkade and seven other dreamers launched Twin Oaks on 69 acres of...

As an FBI agent under J. Edgar Hoover like all Bureau men of his time, Mark Felt was a spit and polish company man who spent much of his time investigating radical hippie movements, wiretapping groups like the Weather Underground and registering disgust over the so-called free love counter-culture. But apparently the counter-culture had captured his own daughter Joan. In an extensive profile of Felt's rebel daughter the Washington Post revealed her ties to the Adidam cult. The paper reported that the cult’s leader is a "a self-proclaimed guru who, in two California lawsuits and several public statements 20 years...

Hippie commune thrives on capitalism SUMMERTOWN, TENN.--Three decades after the golden age of the hippie, about 200 of them are still thriving in a self-supporting commune that operates a midwife service, a soy products company, a mushroom grower and a factory producing personal radiation detectors. Known simply as The Farm, the sprawling collective about an hour southwest of Nashville has outlived nearly all of its tie-dyed contemporaries with a mix of entrepreneurship and idealism, and a touch of sweat. Stephen Gaskin, the former writing instructor who brought his flock to this 1,800-acre site back in 1971, puts it plainly. "We...

These past days have been rich in demonstrations that the Venezuelan state is sinking fast into some type of tribal units ruled by weapons. Sunday's papers reflected the marvelous contradictions in which we live, making Gabriel Garcia Marquez an illuminated amateur. I wanted to start with the latest on the seizure of El Charcote, that X-thousand acres ranch in Cojedes part of a group of ranches owned by British interests. I use the X as a number since the true extent of the land owned, and by whom, has become the mystery du jour. And the source of quite a...

When Christiania, the world's best-known commune, first opened in 1971 there were no rules. It was an anarchist's dreamland that attracted hippies, artists, drug addicts, criminals, idealists, down-and-outs and anyone else who thought there was something rotten in the state of Denmark. One of its early mottos was 'Black sheep from all classes unite!' Then gradually the rules came. The first was no violence. Then there was no hard drugs. Then following battles between drug gangs, who appeared to ignore the first two rules, another rule outlawing weapons was added. After continued problems, residents were forbidden to wear bullet-proof vests....

Arlington, WA – The commune's grey-haired members still consider themselves "flower children", and the Tranquil Garden outside their compound is intact, for now. But the bulldozers are on their way. For the Love Ranch — one of the last true 1960s communes still operating in the United States — the dream of peace and love in one community is finally over. Its founder, a former television salesman named Paul Erdman, brought the group to the banks of the curling Stillaguamish river, 60 miles north of Seattle, to create their own version of a spiritual Utopia. At its peak there were...

Illustration: Carly Sertic / 20Below artistUnshaven legs. Chicken-fried tofu. Strange body piercings. These are considered normal in my home. I live in an 88-acre hippie commune. For those of you with raised eyebrows, that's not its official title. It's actually called Lost Valley Educational Center and it's an intentional community-conference center near Dexter. Twenty other people live with me (although not in the same building). We eat lunch and dinner together, we have meetings together and we're like an extended family. True, a rather strange family, but a tight-knit one just the same. We also have "visiting hippies" who come...

Steven Hawking did not have to attend a Rainbow Family reunion to understand chaos theory, but for nongeniuses the experience can be helpful. For starters, there is nothing like a naked, hairy 50-year-old man squatting in a meadow to remind you of the power of spontaneity. But individual expression aside, the Rainbows have turned the Uinta Mountains into an outdoor laboratory demonstrating how, with time, order can emerge from undesirable randomness. The Rainbows are a vast, leaderless collective of latter-day hippies, anarchists and street people that congregates once a year on public lands to espouse peace and denounce the trappings...