Page 6 - Bulletin #67 - November 2020

Within a few months he managed to have himself appointed as one of the Society’s
trustees, and when Jacob Henrici, who had been a close friend of George Rapp and after
Rapp’s death a community member and trustee, died in 1892, Duss in effect became the
absolute head of the community. He hired expert accountants and lawyers to transfer the
communal assets, heretofore indivisible, to the private and personal ownership of John
Duss. With control of the community’s considerable wealth, Duss sold community
property and paid some members to leave. He proceeded to spend some of the Harmonist
wealth on such ventures as national tours of an orchestra of which he was the conductor.
His most spectacular venture was the building, at a cost of $100,000, of a watery replica
of Venice in Madison Square Garden in New York as a home for one season’s
performances of the Metropolitan Opera.

The Harmony Society finally closed in 1916. Although Duss had seized the society’s
personal property, including its financial resources, the real estate of the beautiful
communal village was transferred to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Today it
remains a museum village and the best memorial, along with New Harmony, of the
amazing century of the Harmony Society. Duss later published his own version of the
Harmonist history in The Harmonists: A Personal History (Harmonie Associates,
1940). But by then the Harmonist story was long over.

The story of Duss and the eviscerating of the Harmonist assets was not lost on other
American communitarians. Several of the Shaker villages have put their properties into
trusts, to preserve their built legacies, as they have closed. Although some of the Shakers
have received new members, they have not let the property fall into the hands of possible 6
scoundrels. America’s communal history is glorious, and even John Duss has not
destroyed that legacy.

Tim Miller is a research professor of religious studies at the University of Kansas and a
historian of American intentional communities, with a focus on the communities of the
second half of the 20th century. His most recent book is Communes in America, 1975-2000,
published by Syracuse University Press in 2019. An earlier volume in that series is The 60s
Communes: Hippies and Beyond. Tim is also author of The Encyclopedic Guide to
American Intentional Communities.

Credits: We thank Professor Tim Miller for permission to reprint this article which first appeared in
Communities #186: https://www.gen-us.net/communities/