How A Failed Socialist Utopia Made Dallas The City It Is Today

[TexasTowelie]

This is not a ghost story. But it’s a story about the ghost of a dream – a French dream – to build a colony for Frenchman fleeing political and economic upheaval that began in Paris and swept across Europe in the late 1840s.

“And this was also around the same time as the French philosophers who were espousing a kind of Democratic Socialism, wherein they could establish colonies somewhere else and have their own community where they could be self-sufficient,” says Paula Bosse, who writes for the Dallas history blog Flashback Dallas. “And a lot of these people went to the United States.”

Several hundred landed across the Trinity River from Dallas. Back then, the Big D was just a scruffy little frontier town. The new settlers named their 2,000-acre colony La Réunion, and they shared a singular ambition: a society where everyone worked together and everyone shared. All for one and one for all.

“There were no burdens placed on them by the ruling party,” Bosse says. “Basically, they were in charge of their own lives. The United States in the 1850s was pretty wide open, especially in Texas.”

Read more: http://www.texasstandard.org/stories/how-a-failed-socialist-utopia-made-dallas-the-city-it-is-today/

[underpants]

1. Very interesting

Thanks will read the whole thing later.

[Nitram]

2. The wide open spaces and freedom allowed in the young US encouraged a number of experiments in

building intentional communities or utopias. Europeans could move from a straight-jacketed traditional society in a crowded city to the US and travel to a largely uninhabited place where they could live out their philosophical dream without interference from the outside world. Too bad none of them succeeded.