Diary Offers a Peek Into Communal Society : History: Recently opened archives provide material for books on the Oneida Community of Christian Perfectionists, a 19th-Century experiment in group living, socialist industry and idiosyncratic sex.

Victor Hawley yearned to father a child, but the “breeding committee” said no. Instead, his beloved Mary Jones was impregnated by the son of the commune’s leader.

It sounds like the far-fetched plot of some futuristic soap opera. But it’s a page out of American history.

Hawley was one of 300 people who lived in the Oneida Community, a group of Christian Perfectionists led by John Humphrey Noyes. Hawley wrote of his tormented love affair in a diary in 1877, as Oneida was nearing the end of its 30-year adventure in group living, socialist industry and idiosyncratic sex.

Regarded as the most successful of 19th-Century America’s 40 or so utopian communes, Oneida has long intrigued social historians. A dozen books have been written about the community, which was born in an era of religious zeal and ultimately evolved into the world’s largest silverware company, Oneida Ltd.

The two latest books are Spencer Klaw’s “Without Sin,” published last September by Penguin Books, and Robert S. Fogarty’s “Special Love, Special Sex,” to be published in June by Syracuse University Press.

Hawley’s diary is the basis for the book by Fogarty, a history professor at Antioch College who has written extensively on utopian communities.

The charismatic Noyes brought his disciples to this rural spot 100 miles west of Albany in 1848. At the time, religious revivals were so hot in western New York that the region was nicknamed the “burned-over district.”

The Perfectionists set out to create a new Eden on Oneida Creek. They built an imposing brick edifice called the Mansion House, where they strove to live without sin, selflessly sharing everything: work, play, intellectual studies, Bible readings, housework, child-rearing and sexual partners.

Monogamous marriage, which might pit a couple’s interests against those of the group, was replaced by “complex marriage.” All were as one family. Children were raised communally, apart from their mothers, who might otherwise develop an “idolatrous” love for them.

Klaw recounts how Oneida girls ceremoniously burned their favorite dolls to overcome the “doll-spirit,” a form of “graven image” worship that distracted from studies.

Hard work was a major theme at Oneida. The commune supported itself by farming, canning fruits and vegetables, and making silk thread, travel bags, brooms, chains, rustic seats, silver spoons and, most profitably, steel animal traps.

Sex was also a big part of life at Oneida. Noyes encouraged free and vigorous sex within the community, comparing it to religious ecstasy.

There were rules, however. One was “male continence,” requiring men to avoid sexual climax as a means of birth control.

Another rule involved what Noyes called “ascending fellowship.” Young people were paired sexually with their elders for spiritual benefits. Noyes took on the duty of initiating virgins, as young as 13, into the “complex marriage.’

The hardest rule for Hawley, a dental assistant, was the one forbidding “special love.” To prevent such romantic attachments, a committee cleared all sexual liaisons and kept people circulating.

Eventually, Noyes became interested in “scientific breeding” to create a spiritually superior race. In 1869, he initiated the only major eugenics experiment undertaken in America. Noyes himself sired nine of the 58 “stirpicults,” as he termed the children born of committee-approved parents.

The community disbanded in 1881, after an aging Noyes fled to Canada, fearing arrest on adultery and fornication charges. By then, the religious zeal that sustained the community had waned, internal disputes had arisen, and no strong leader emerged to replace the messianic Noyes.

The dissolved community’s assets were formed into a joint-stock company, now Oneida Ltd., which boasts the most-recognized name in silverware.

Oneida Ltd. was a true family business for decades after the commune disbanded, led by sons of Noyes and other former commune members. Today, there are few commune descendants among the corporate brass, who stress inventiveness and productivity rather than sex when asked about the old community.

Klaw, a magazine writer who lives in Connecticut, says thousands of Oneida documents were burned in the 1940s. Copies of those records, kept by a nephew of Noyes, have recently been made available to researchers, he said.

As for Victor Hawley and Mary Jones, they left Oneida after he nursed her through an agonizing pregnancy that ended in stillbirth. They married, had five children, and lived on their own, outside the embrace of Eden.