Sabotaged: Dreams of Utopia in Texas by James Pratt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sabotaged: Dreams of Utopia in Texas by James Pratt Michael Phillips Sabotaged: Dreams of Utopia in Texas. By James Pratt. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 307. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-0792-0.) La Réunion, a failed socialist utopian community established in 1855 near modern-day West Dallas, Texas, had long fascinated the late architect James Pratt, who founded the Dallas Historical Society's La Réunion research project. Pratt encapsulates a lifetime of work in this highly readable, at times novelistic, study of a once-idealistic community that died, the author suggests, due to naiveté, conflicting egos, and the deep personal flaws of its founder, Victor Considerant. Through his 1854 book Au Texas, French author and political theorist Considerant persuaded around three hundred Belgian, French, Swiss, and Polish colonists to pack up their belongings and build a new egalitarian society in an American slave state. Considerant's plans rested on the ideas of Charles Fourier, an early-nineteenth-century philosopher critical of the alienation produced by the early stages of industrialization. Pratt argues that through a combination of selfishness, arrogance, denial of climatological and political realities in Texas, and inflexibility in the face of unexpected challenges, Considerant sabotaged his own creation, with the colony dissolving and many of its financially and emotionally broken inhabitants retreating back to Europe in 1859. Fourier called for organizing society on the basis of what he called phalanxes, self-contained collections of producers who would till the land, own property communally, rotate responsibilities, and share work across gender lines. Fourier rejected Christianity's condemnation of earthly pleasures and the [End Page 562] gender roles imposed on women, which he believed forced their attention inward toward the family rather than outward toward the greater society. A Fourier admirer, Considerant urged his fellow Europeans dismayed by the failed European revolutions of 1848 to flee the reactionary monarchies on that continent and relocate to a place he misleadingly described as an empty, Eden-like wilderness characterized by mild weather, an abundance of free land, and easy access to lucrative American markets. The realities of Texas—its stifling summer heat, periodic droughts, biting insects, and barely existent transportation networks—repeatedly traumatized many of the La Réunion newcomers as they spent weeks traveling 243 miles overland northward from Buffalo Bayou to the 2,500-acre would-be commune near the Trinity River. Considerant was as poor a political scientist as he was a geographer. He had promised his financial backers that he would be able to obtain thousands of acres of free land for the colony, as Stephen F. Austin had done in Central Texas when the area was still part of Mexico, and William S. Peters did in North Texas in the days of the Texas Republic. Considerant did not know that the power to award such grants no longer rested with the Texas governor; he now had to deal with a contentious state legislature that by 1855–1859 was bitterly divided by the possibility of secession from the United States over slavery. Considerant somehow underestimated the political problems that his colony's opposition to slavery would cause, and he was caught off guard by the intense anti-immigrant sentiments of the state's ascendant Know-Nothing movement. Finally, Considerant was condescending toward and dishonest in his dealings with his supposed allies, including far more capable cohorts such as Dr. Auguste Savardan. Pratt was not a professional historian, and it shows in his dated assessment of southern-sympathizing northern politicians such as Franklin Pierce, whom he describes as "men of high principle," and his sometimes patronizing description of mid-nineteenth-century feminists (p. 105). Pratt also admits to creating dialogue and even inner monologues for the major figures in his book to add to the drama. Still, Sabotaged: Dreams of Utopia in Texas is a richly detailed account of the early Texas Left and a surprising chapter in the history of a historically conservative city. Michael Phillips Collin College Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association