In 1848, a preacher named John Humphrey Noyes founded a religious community in upstate New York built around an idea most Americans found unthinkable. At Oneida, traditional marriage was abolished in favor of what Noyes called "complex marriage," a system in which exclusive pairings were forbidden and sexual relationships were governed by the community's leadership. Children were raised collectively. Reproduction was controlled through a program of selective breeding Noyes called stirpiculture. For more than thirty years, the Oneida Community grew, prospered, and held itself out as proof that human beings could live without sin. Then it collapsed. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores how one of the most ambitious utopian experiments in American history became one of the strangest, the doctrine of perfection that justified it, and what was really happening inside the community walls.
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