The Utopian Colony of La Reunion As Social Mirror of Frontier Texas and Icon of Modern Dallas (Report)

The direct bond between Europe and the United States in the first decades of the nineteenth century produced immigrant communities of all sorts within an American setting. (1) Though accommodating rapidly to the social and political ideals of their new country, those who colonized these settlements could not easily forget their violent and often revolutionary pasts. Nowhere in nineteenth-century America was this rivalry between imported ideas and indigenous conditions more pronounced than in key religious, communist, and socialist colonies that sprouted from Massachusetts to Utah in the years immediately preceding the American Civil War. (2) To understand how one group of French, Belgian, Swiss, and Alsatian immigrants, who were often branded as radical by contemporary American standards, found a home in the nativist confines of Texas, this study focuses on the utopian colony of La Reunion that scratched out a meager existence in Dallas from 1855 to 1858, but shaped the burgeoning frontier town long thereafter. Given the checkered fate of contemporaneous socialist ventures across the United States, (3) the failure of the "Old French Colony"--as La Reunion is still referred to in Dallas circles was hardly unexpected. Its steady cultural and intellectual influence on one of America's most politically conservative cities, however, is indeed surprising. The relationship between America and European socialism that emerged after the French Revolution (post-1789) was one in which participants often misunderstood each others' conceptual foundations and specific motivations. While attempting to establish themselves in a country that either tacitly allowed or openly encouraged chattel slavery, Europe's radical immigrants, many of them followers of Charles Fourier (1772-1837) (4) and Robert Owens (1813-1858), (5) looked upon America's "peculiar institution" as simply another form of class domination. (6) For its part, much of antebellum America viewed socialists as part of a much broader immigration problem. Fearful of losing the foundational ideals of their country due to the spread of socialist and communist concepts that accompanied the flood of European newcomers in the 1840s and 1850s, many U.S. citizens agreed with the nativist stance espoused by the Know Nothing Party, which viewed uncontrolled immigration as a clear danger to American democracy. (7)