day, and dream over it, and sleep over it.” Charles’s own fanaticism grew until, when he was eighteen years old, he left the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to join a commune in upstate New York founded by his father’s religious mentor, John Humphrey Noyes.
The central tenet of Noyes’s doctrine—and the idea that appealed most to men like Guiteau’s father—was perfectionism. Noyes believed that, through prayer and the right kind of education, a person could become intellectually, morally, and spiritually perfect, and so would be free from sin. Noyes believed that he had reached perfection and was anointed by God to help others shed their own sins. With this goal in mind, he had founded his commune, the Oneida Community, named for the town in which it was established in 1848. Oneida would last more than thirty years, becoming the most successful utopian socialist community in the United States.
Like most of Noyes’s followers, Guiteau moved into the “Mansion House,” a sprawling brick Victorian Gothic building that, over time, would grow to ninety-three thousand square feet. It held thirty-five apartments for the nearly three hundred members of the commune. Although the private rooms were small and unadorned, the property had a wide variety of fairly elaborate communal amenities—from theaters to a photographic studio to a Turkish bath.
Guiteau’s father dreamed of living in the Mansion House, but his second wife refused to follow him, perhaps in part because of the community’s practice of “complex marriage,” or free love—a concept that Noyes had developed himself, and practiced liberally. According to Noyes, monogamous love was not only selfish but “unhealthy and pernicious,” and the commune’s members were encouraged to have a wide variety of sexual partners in the hope that they would not fall in love with any one person.
In an effort to avoid too many pregnancies, Noyes preached what he called “male continence.” Intercourse, “up to the very moment of emission,” he insisted, “is voluntary, entirely under the control of the moral faculty, and can be stopped at any point. In other words, the presence and the motions can be continued or stopped at will, and it is only the final crisis of emission that is automatic or uncontrollable.… If you say that this is impossible, I answer that I know it is possible—nay, that it is easy.” It was like rowing a boat, Noyes said. If you stay near the shore, you’ll be fine. It’s only when you row too near a waterfall that you find yourself in danger.
Guiteau was enthusiastic about complex marriage, and was willing to try male continence, but he quickly found that life at Oneida required far more humility than he could tolerate. Members of the commune were not only expected to help anywhere they were needed—from the kitchen to the fields—doing work that Guiteau found tiresome and demeaning, but to accept the work gratefully and humbly. Guiteau felt that Noyes and his followers should be grateful to him, rather than the other way around. In a letter to Noyes he wrote, “You prayed God … to send you help, and he has sent me. Had he not sent me, you may depend upon it, I never should have come.” Believing that he should be shown special deference, and offended by the disapproval and, at times, disdain with which he was treated in the community, he said, “I ask no one to respect me personally, but I do ask them to respect me as an envoy of the true God.” He was, he believed, “God’s minute man.”
Although Guiteau claimed to work directly for God—to be “in the employ of Jesus Christ & Co., the very ablest and strongest firm in the universe”—he expected more than heavenly rewards. He wanted all the pleasures the world had to offer, chief among them fame. On one occasion, a member of the commune picked up a slip of paper he had seen Guiteau drop. On it Guiteau, uneducated, isolated, and friendless, had written a strangely grandiose, utterly delusional announcement: “Chas. J. Guiteau of England, Premier of the British Lion will lecture this evening at seven o’clock.”
Guiteau’s extravagant dreams and delusions persisted in the face of consistent and complete failure. Although the commune promised the pleasures of complex marriage, to Guiteau’s frustration, “the Community women,” one of Oneida’s members would later admit, “did not extend love and confidence toward him.” In fact, so thorough was his rejection among the women that they nicknamed him “Charles Gitout.” He bitterly complained that, while at