Anglo-American Salvation Army Farm Colonies, 1890-1910

LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY farm colonization schemes of the Salvation Army in England and the United States provide an excellent example of the nature of communalistic thinking in the 1890's.Compared to earlier nineteenth-century communal enterprises the Army's colonies were less idealistic, more "business-like" and "scientific" in their organization.These were not experiments to see how well one sector of society could live.Instead, they were intended as schemes for remaking society as a whole.Broad in scope, these schemes were intended as national or even international exemplars of what a society could do to right itself.The Army set out to gather support of philanthropists, politicians, and educators, against a background of anxiety over what society had become, particularly its urban life with slums, tenements, unemployment, disintegrating families, loss of religious sentiment, drunkenness, gambling, all in the context of an uncaring economic system.Out of frustration, reformers contemplated an idyllic past largely associated with farm life, simpler times, in an environment that produced sturdy values.That country life was not idyllic would later surprise them.But they were willing to take on all obstacles in a most practical manner to remove the "waste labor" of cities to the "waste land" of the country by means of "waste capital" in order, as Frederick de Latour Booth-Tucker put it, to turn this trinity of waste into a trinity of wealth. 1 In the 1890's