The Miltonic Informing of Owen's Vision

Portrait of Alfred K. Owen courtesy of Fresno State Special Collection 

From Integral Co-operation. Photo Courtesy of Fresno State Special Collections

Alfred K. Owen: Utopian Dreamer

Utopias, whether literary or lived, are often born from the mind of a single individual, a visionary. The utopian colony of Topolobampo was no different. The visionary and founder of Topolobampo was Albert K. Owen—a civil engineer from Pennsylvania. The United States was undergoing Reconstruction after the travesty of the Civil War, while also coming to terms with the effect of the Industrial Revolution. These are the circumstances that opened the hearts and minds of the utopians to Owen's dream of finding a better way to live in time. 

The dream included a glorious Pacific City which was to rise on the flat terrain behind the hills encircling the bay - the deep, landlocked harbor of Topolobampo overlooking the Pacific Coast. Owen obtained from the government of Porfirio Díaz a concession for a large tract of land extending from the Fuerte River to the Bay along with rights to water, which was to be brought by a canal that Owen promised to build.

Photo Courtesy of Fresno State Special Collections

Temperance

Albert Owen quotes many sources in his works, including poet and author John Milton—whose works Paradise Lost and Areopagitica were of renown importance to the English-speaking world during the 19^th century. In each of the afore mentioned works, Milton emphasizes the thematic matter of “temperance.” As scholar Michael Schoenfeldt explains, “the original act of intemperance introduces the illnesses that intemperate eating was thought in contemporary physiology to produce”; therefore, Michael tells Adam that “If [he] well observe / The rule of not too much, by temperance taught, / In what [he] eat’st and drink’st, seeking…/…not gluttonous delight” (11.530-33), he will not die before the time is ripe (159). In short, temperance assuages the effects of mankind’s sin. At the end of the poem, Milton suggests that man can create a paradise within himself as the result of a “series of social and dietary practices that cultivate the inner spaces of the postlapsarian subject” (162). In Owen’s development of his own utopic vision, I believe that Miltonic conception of temperance was at the heart of Owen’s ideology.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2005.

Schoenfeldt, Michael C., “Temperance and temptation: The alimental vision in Paradise Lost,” in Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, 131-168. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Miltonian Notion of Lisence and Liberty

In the front page of this incarnation of integral cooperation, A. Owen again quotes John Milton: "License they mean when they cry liberty.” Milton's quote is taken from poem "Sonnet 12," and the last six lines read:

"That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,

And still revolt when truth would set them free.

Licence they mean when they cry liberty;

For who loves that, must first be wise and good.

But from that mark how far they rove we see,

For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood."

This poem was written when Milton’s divorce law was rejected. He tried to blame Presbyterians for declaring the same liberal laws which were used as part of ancient norms to play their hypocrisy hiding under the face of false freedom. The poem has specific audience as its readers and is especially targeted against the Presbyterians for redefining the rules of liberty. The poet initiates in a tone of disgust that all he did was to try to educate the people to quit the ancient norms of the society and form new laws to redefine the constitution. But no sooner does he try to help them, that the greater voice of nobles and so-called learned aristocrats, start hounding him to call out his opinions publicly and ridicule him in front of everyone. He gives away in metaphor by comparing “owls, cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs,” with those who not only consider reflecting upon his views rather they shut him up. He is appalled by the reactions of those who completely went against him.

Photo Courtesy of Fresno State Special Collections

Lisence and Liberty (continued)

As previously mentioned, on the front page of Integral Co-operation Owen quotes Milton saying, “License they cry when they mean liberty.” Here, in Dont, Never, and Always, Owen is listing a series of “Don’ts.” The fifteenth is “Do not hesitate between liberty and license” (3). For Owen, liberty is freedom to act according to what is permitted by cultured society. License, then, is what is allowed by society under the condition that it brings in revenue. However, it is not just surplus income that irks Owen. in A Dream of an Ideal City

Owen on the English and American Understanding of Liberty

Order (Contiued)

In Owens, I Dream of an Ideal City, he excises two non-sequential stanzas of Alfred Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, naming it instead The New Order. Owen’s arrangement reads:

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

   And ancient forms of party strife;

   Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

   Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

I will first close read part of the poem that will help to open up its meaning. Then I will apply that understanding to Owen’s use of the poem. In the poem, Tennyson is calling for metaphorical bells to ring out old emotions and old ideas which have isolated man from humanity and stunted his well-being. Tennyson hopes the bells will ring mankind unite mankind. In the last line, he calls for the ringing "out of the darkness of the land” and, hence, looks forward to an earthly paradise, a utopia. In the last stanza, Tennyson calls for a new man saying, “Ring in the Christ that is to be.” Tennyson’s believe is that humankind will then move and follow this character.

As mentioned earlier, Owen renames the poem The New Order. It appears that Owen also hopes that the ringing "out of the darkness of the land” will usher in an earthly paradise. The difference is that own stealthily posits himself as the savior that “is to be.” While Owen’s obsession with order comes from Milton, Owen seems more than willing to appropriate and also the meaning of other works of poetry.

From Integral Co-operation. Photo Courtesy of Fresno State Special Collections

From Integral Co-operation. Photo Courtesy of Fresno State Special Collections

Owen Milton and Order

Visible at the top of the image of the Integral-Cooperation cover is a quote by John Milton that reads “Order is God’s first law.” He places the quotes on multiple editions of Integral of Co-operation. I am not going to accuse Owen of manipulation by using the rhetorical argument of divine authority in saying that order is “God’s” first law, but it is important to understanding his vision and ideology to see how Owen implemented Miltonian Order. In A Dream of an Ideal City, he speaks about his utopia being “managed with order, system and authority from start to finish” (7). Owen shows his Miltonian order again on page 11 where he saves, “I love to dream of a city where there will be no…disorder.”