When President James Garfield was gunned down at the Washington, DC, train station in 1882, his assassination came at the hand of a man who was arguably one of history’s first incels: Charles Guiteau.
Guiteau wasn’t unable to find love only in the real world — he also failed to find it at the Oneida Community, an upstate New York colony that practiced “regulated promiscuity.” Traditional marriage was banned there, but the male and female members were all considered man and wife, meaning anyone could sleep with anyone who agreed. The problem for Guiteau is that not one woman at Oneida welcomed the short, excitable, redhead into her bed. Instead, the community’s fairer sex tagged Charles with a nickname: “Git out!”
“Sexual frustration . . . was the main cause of Guiteau’s misery,” writes Susan Wels in “An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a 19th-century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder” (Pegasus Crime).
Between 1800 and 1860, more than 70 utopian communes were established in the United States, but Wels calls the Oneida Community “the most successful . . . experiment in American history.” It prospered from the 1840s to the 1870s, home to hundreds of acres of fruit orchards and fields filled with Ayrshire cattle and Cotswold sheep. At its peak, more than 300 people lived on-site, many in the 3-story mansion they’d built by hand, while factories and sawmills provided all the money and supplies the inhabitants needed.
There was “free love,” too, a term coined by Oneida founder John Humphrey Noyes. Ironically, Noyes himself had been a sexually frustrated young man, not losing his virginity until he was 26. He was so painfully self-conscious that he gave up being a lawyer because he couldn’t even speak in court. Noyes also admitted he was so scared of women he’d rather “face a battery of cannons.”
Noyes was studying at Yale Divinity School in 1831 when a mentor advised him to find his own truth. Noyes ran with that, announcing himself as “perfect” and “incapable of sin.” His fellow students thought him mad and he was nearly expelled, but Noyes took up his newfound religious zeal as a traveling evangelist.
In 1835, the 23-year-old Noyes and a fellow preacher settled in liberal Brimfield, Mass., where they were immediately beset by temptations. One woman kissed the innocent Noyes so “seductively” that he fled town, walking more than 50 miles through the snow to his hometown of Putney, Vt. Noyes’ colleague was visited that night by two other young women, who snuck into his lodgings to prove their religious faith could overcome any sexual desire.
It did not, in what would became a scandal famously called “the Brimfield Bundling.”
By the time a paramour in Vermont dumped Noyes to marry another, he declared that “marriage and sexual exclusiveness . . . would no longer exist on earth.” Noyes nonchalantly wed a plain, older woman and told her their union would be “open.”
The two entered a “group marriage” with another couple, and soon three of Noyes’ eight siblings joined the group. All agreed to submit to the leader, John Humphrey Noyes, in all things, including “carnal relations.”
The communal experiment went awry only with the angry townsfolk of Putney had Noyes arrested for adultery and fornication. Fearing for his life, he fled to Oneida, New York, where a farmer who favored Noyes’ ideas offered land.
There, the Oneida Community became renowned as a successful utopian experiment, but its sexual practices raised even more eyebrows.
“As a branch of the Kingdom of Heaven . . . the society banned private property, monogamy and sexual shame. Physical union . . . was as holy as the Garden of Eden and God in heaven,” Wels quotes Noyes as saying.
Part of Noyes’ philosophy was that the community’s older members should educate the younger on the ways of love. That meant post-menopausal women acted as sex tutors to pubescent young men, but also that Noyes and his older cronies could do the same with the teenage girls who lived on the farm.
“And [Noyes] had no qualms about shattering the taboo of incest,” Wels wrote. He engaged in a long-time affair with his niece, Tirzah, whom he tried but failed to impregnate. Noyes’ brother George was more successful, siring a child with her.
In its heyday, visitors flocked to the Oneida Community to see its fertile grounds, enjoying picnics and strawberries and cream while sneaking furtive glances around. In the 1860s alone more than 50,000 guests were welcomed, including President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, Susan B. Anthony, and New York publisher Horace Greeley.
Greeley supported many similar utopias over the years — most of which failed — but he didn’t share Oneida’s views on sex. He believed married couples should have intercourse only once a month and that masturbation was a scourge on society, claiming it could lead to insanity, bad breath and “running sores.”
“If I cannot get notoriety for good, I will get if for evil … I will shoot some of our public men.”
Charles Julius Guiteau
A significant problem the Community faced was the number of “infidels, spiritualists, [and] irresponsible free lovers” who wanted to join. One man moved in with his wife and family and immediately began trying to lure the farm’s young girls into his clutches with sugar plums and candies. Noyes and his cabal were so enraged they threw the pervert out a third-story window, believing that those girls were meant only for the Community’s leaders.
In 1860 another problematic resident arrived from Utica, New York, 19-year-old Charles Julius Guiteau. Guiteau claimed he wanted to join the community but famously didn’t like to work, even though everyone on the property — including Noyes — labored heavily every day.
But Guiteau said he “’felt like a slave . . . bound hand and foot.’” He had a quick temper and was often seen gesturing or muttering, frequently idling away work hours sitting in a corner by himself. Not surprisingly, he was never popular with Oneida’s women.
The masterful showman invested in Greeley’s utopian venture in Colorado.
“He especially despised his celibacy in a community … that encouraged ‘promiscuous intercourse,’” Wels writes.
It’s no wonder Noyes would later described Guiteau as being “addicted to self-abuse,” a.k.a. masturbation.
Guiteau spent five unsatisfying years at Oneida, before fleeing to undertake a meandering, dissolute life. In Chicago he managed an unsuccessful marriage with a librarian named Annie, an Englishwoman. Later, she said there had originally been “nothing peculiar” about Charles, although he soon began to dress and act like a dandy and cheat everyone at everything. That including cheating on Annie whenever possible, including with prostitutes, which is likely how he ended up with syphilis. Guiteau failed as a writer and publisher and had an unsuccessful law career, frequently having to escape where he lived when unable to pay the bills. His own family came to believe he was beginning to lose his mind.
But Guiteau always had grandiose ideas about his own importance. When he was at Oneida, he believed he’d soon become Noyes’ co-leader. When that didn’t pan out, he decided he’d rather be President of the United States.
Eventually he told an acquaintance, “If I cannot get notoriety for good, I will get if for evil … I will shoot some of our public men.”
Guiteau was good to his word. In 1882 he bought an “English Bulldog five-shooter, with a fancy ivory handle — a weapon that was worthy, he imagined, to be preserved for history.” On July 2, he walked up behind President James Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station and shot him twice, once in the arm and once in the back. Garfield fell to the floor and would never recover from his wounds, dying two months later.
Guiteau was quickly arrested but welcomed the infamy. “I have no doubt but that my name and work will roll thundering down the ages” he boasted from jail.
Guiteau would eventually be hanged for the assassination of Garfield, but not before his connection to Oneida was established. His lawyer tried to use that experience as a defense for his actions, getting one expert witness to attest that at Oneida Guiteau learned the “sensualism” and “self-conceit” that “laid the foundation for . . . his dishonorable conduct.” But Guiteau never experienced enough of the sensualism he wanted at Oneida, meaning it might’ve been one too many sexual rejections that led to the death of an American president.