Report on Utopia

ANGEL IN THE FOREST -- Marguer/'re Young--Reynal & Hitchcock ($3).

On the banks of the Wabash, some 30 miles from Evansville, Indiana, stands New Harmony, an ordinary, none too sprightly town of 1,400 souls, approached by a creaking ferry and boasting a 5-&-io/ store, a saloon or two, and a movie theater. There, some time between 1815 and 1824, an angel descended to the green earth. Many later saw the angel's footprint, embedded in a slab of stone; but only one man, a six-foot patriarch with snowy beard and flowing white locks, saw the angel himself. The lone wit ness was Father George Rapp, founder of the first of two Utopias that flowered and withered in New Harmony early last century. Exploring their brief history. Mar guerite Young has written a sometimes difficult, often fascinating book whose erudite, poetical meandering explores some forgotten corners in the attic of U.S. history.

Of all the escapist Utopias that mush roomed in the shadow of the industrial revolution. Father Rapp's was the least suggestive of milk & honey. His first ven ture was in Germany. The spiritual leader of a flock of phlegmatic German peasants, Peasant Rapp was a mystic with a sound business head. In 1804 he brought his peo ple to the U.S. ''not because he believed that God's voice would speak out of the marsh more clearly than it had spoken out of the vineyard in Wiirttemberg -- but be cause the land was fierce and cheap." Celibate Communists. Settling in Har mony, Pennsylvania, his harsh, puritanical doctrines and iron discipline turned the religious zeal of his "spiritual communists" to good account. Within a year his colony of 60 log cabins had become a thriving community with gristmill, barns, shops, houses of worship, sawmills, a tannery and a distillery. To keep his workers' energy channeled and profits limited, absolute celibacy was the rule in Father Rapp's Utopia.

When the young wife of John Rapp, the leader's son, became pregnant, vengeance struck quickly. John was found dead and castrated near the Rappite piggery. The Rappites stood in awe in the face of such Divine Wrath, though there were whispers that young Rapp's earthly father had done the deed.

Whether because of the whispers or not, Father Rapp soon adopted another son, sold the Pennsylvania property and moved on to Indiana. There his well-disciplined communists prospered even more, while the new son, Frederick, asked himself: Was not this holy continence "merely the end result of a system of covetousness?" In time such doubts were to spread through the Rappite harmony -- but not for many years. Meantime Rapp had taken his flock to greener pastures in Economy, Pa. In May, 1824, Harmony, Indiana, was sold lock, stock & angel's footprint to a dreamy Welshman, Robert Owen, who believed in happiness, love and government without punishment.

The Bliss of the McGuffogs. To wen, the spiritual father of socialism and the labor union, Author Young devotes most of her history. Her ironic prose serves admirably to ridicule the pomposi ties of the Victorian world against which Owen spent his life tilting.

Born in 1771, the son of a farmer, Owen yearned to see the world. At ten, he be came a clerk in McGuffog's drapery shop at Stamford, England. There, lost in thought amid the bolts of cotton, he "began to see sectarianism as the root of evil. He noticed the conjugal bliss of his employers, that although Mrs. McGuffog went to High Church and Mr. McGuffog to Low Church, they drank water from the same well and the water was not poisoned.

. . . Why should men be split asunder by abstruse considerations, such as the nature of the body of Jesus Christ?" Obsessed with dreams of a happier world, Owen was nonetheless practical enough to become part owner of a cotton mill at New Lanark in Scotland. There Owen practiced his preaching, "to show that man is the best of all possible ma chineries, a being responsible to the best care." Owen's partners watched his experiments patiently, but bathtubs, school rooms, shorter hours, little mill children clustered lovingly about an owner, and "other airy projects" were too much for them. They presented their junior partner with a silver salver in recognition of an undeniable increase in dividends "and suggested that he give up his many charities." Even his "dearest Caroline," a devout Calvinist, began to wish ardently that her Robert would walk closer to "the straight and narrow way of God." Prairie Paradise. When, after discouraging years in England, Robert Owen's eye lit on an advertisement in the London Times offering a town for sale, he "saw, beyond the rolling seas, the promise of America, a place where there would be an end to the concocting of holy lies." He gathered a group of disciples and sailed to the Utopia vacated by George Rapp.

In New Harmony, 800 starry-eyed Owenites embarked on the perfect life.

"Drawn together . . . from the four points of the compass without much deliberation or any reference to their professional usefulness," there were among them "twelve seamstresses and mantua-makers but not a saddler, two watchmakers but , . . only 36 farmers and field laborers to feed the large population, still swelling like a tide." Impossible Shangri-La. Owen's earthly paradise was soon torn by dissension and engulfed by practical economics. In less than three years it was all over. New Har mony, lodestar of dreamers and crackpots from all over the earth, was sold to a moon-faced cardsharp and forger who promptly opened a saloon in a handy cow shelter. Robert Owen went on, for 30-odd years, to preach the doctrine of equality, reform and free love to crowned heads and commoners all over Europe and to plan more Utopias.

New Harmony has gradually become as rationally imperfect as other places -- perhaps a little more so. The local theater owner still complains of the week he showed Lost Horizon. "The farmers saw no sense in the damned thing, Shangri-La, snow one minute and warm sunlight with green leaves the next. Such things simply could not happen, they say -- and would rather see something that is at least pos sible, like Shirley Temple."

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