An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder By Susan Wels Pegasus Books, 2023, $27.95
AN ASSASSIN IN UTOPIA engagingly recounts the story of President James Garfield’s 1881 assassination by Charles Guiteau against the backdrop of a 19th-century landscape overstuffed with characters that continue to amaze and entertain us. Horace Greeley, P. T. Barnum, Margaret Fuller, Pauline Cushman, the Fox sisters, Roscoe Conkling, and James G. Blaine are among those making appearances, sometimes with only a tangential relationship to the story.
The utopia of the book’s title—the Oneida Community in central New York—is best known today as the manufacturer of tableware and cutlery. But for more than three decades after its 1847 establishment, Oneida was known for something else entirely—a devotion to sexual freedom, as defined by its founder John Humphrey Noyes, that both scandalized and titillated.
“In a holy community there is no more reason why sexual intercourse shall be restrained by law than why eating and drinking should be,” he had written in 1837, “and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other.” In the midst of New York State’s Burned-Over district, which spawned, among others, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and the millenarian prognosticator William Miller, Noyes soon found eager supplicants. Within a year, Oneida was home to 87 men, women, and children, and by 1860 had become a prosperous community whose well-tended fields, manufactories, and notorious lifestyle combined to attract tourists.
In June 1860, the 19-year-old Charles Guiteau left college in Michigan to join the community. He was soon disillusioned, complaining of working too hard and resenting the practice wherein community leaders subjected members to public criticism.
But most frustrating was Guiteau’s inability to form any sexual liaisons; so unpopular was he that Oneida women dubbed him “Git out.” In April 1865, Guiteau set out for New York, but within three months was back and almost immediately complaining again about his sexual rejection. “We took you in out of charity,” responded the Oneida leadership. “You are now, and always have been, a dead weight.” By November 1866, Guiteau was gone for good.
For the next 15 years, Guiteau shuttled back and forth between Boston, New York, and Chicago, usually dodging a
