Books, Arts & Manners: Waco, New York

Without Sin, by Spencer Klaw (Allen Lane Press, 337 pp., $25)

FROM 1848 to 1880, the Oneida Community practiced the principles of what it called Bible Communism in upstate New York. The Biblical Communists supported themselves by making box traps, flatware, and a host of other useful items. Men and women alike wore pants, though it was what they did with their pants off that piqued the curiosity of their century and ours. Spencer Klaw, drawing on a mass of diaries, letters, and records—some made public for the first time—presents all the sexual strangeness, as well as aspects of the community that were even more strange.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Without Sin, by Spencer Klaw (Allen Lane Press, 337 pp., $25)

FROM 1848 to 1880, the Oneida Community practiced the principles of what it called Bible Communism in upstate New York. The Biblical Communists supported themselves by making box traps, flatware, and a host of other useful items. Men and women alike wore pants, though it was what they did with their pants off that piqued the curiosity of their century and ours. Spencer Klaw, drawing on a mass of diaries, letters, and records—some made public for the first time—presents all the sexual strangeness, as well as aspects of the community that were even more strange.