In one respect only Owen’s venture was a notable success. He made America community-minded. The same generation which believed so fervently in the perfectibility of man, which tossed out Calvinism and embraced in its stead Unitarianism, millennialism, and total abstinence, was ripe, ideologically at least, for communism as well. In 1840 Emerson wrote to Carlyle: “Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”
