“To a man or woman not thoroughly and earnestly in love with an ascetic life and deeply disgusted with the world, Shakerism would be unendurable.” So wrote the Prussian-born journalist Charles Nordhoff in The Communistic Societies of The United States (1875), a field report on utopian settlements that were flourishing across the country. He’d toured quite a few of these fragile alternative outposts, each one an exception meant to disprove the rule of American capitalism.