Table Of ContentThe Business of Marketing,
Entrepreneurship,
and Architecture of
Communal Societies in the
1960s and 1970s
Rahima Schwenkbeck
The Business of Marketing, Entrepreneurship,
and Architecture of Communal Societies in the
1960s and 1970s
“Schwenkbeck provides an intriguing and engaging analysis of three African-
American communal groups in the 1960s and 1970s. The book offers a lens to
exemplify a much larger trend in the formation of utopian communities in the
United States at the time. Based on in-depth empirical research, Schwenkbeck
weaves her three cases into a highly readable narrative connecting categories of
race, business, community and entrepreneurship in the context of an increasingly
volatile economy, political tension and blatant racism.”
—Martin Lutz, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
Rahima Schwenkbeck
The Business
of Marketing,
Entrepreneurship,
and Architecture
of Communal
Societies in the 1960s
and 1970s
Rahima Schwenkbeck
Business Historian
Las Vegas, NV, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-88353-9 ISBN 978-3-030-88354-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88354-6
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For my mother, Ruth L. Schwenkbeck, who taught me two very
valuable things:
always spread kindness and question authority
A
cknowledgments
In editing this, I am reminded of the many wonderful moments spent in
coffee shops, airports, airplanes, ho(s)tels, apartments, picnic tables,
cramped bus rides, the Metro, various restaurants, my family’s home, and
work writing this. Writing the acknowledgments section is the most diffi-
cult part since I am thankful to know so many wonderful people and have
such little space here to celebrate them. I am thankful for my husband,
Sean, and his quiet brilliance and sense of adventure. Without my sister,
Sharifa, her husband, Chris, and my brother, Aziz, this would not have
been possible. I am eternally grateful to them, their kindness, selflessness,
surprise clowns, love, and charcuterie boards.
I’ve been very fortunate to receive several research and travel grants to
help fund my research, such as the Jeffrey C. Kasch Foundation Grant, the
James and Sylvia Thayer Research Fellowship, the Michael K. Schoenecke
Travel Award, the Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Travel Grant, and the Center for
Communal Studies Research Travel Grant. I am forever indebted to the
very warm welcome, guidance, and support of Jennifer Greene, Dr. Casey
Harison, and Dr. Donald Pitzer at the Center for Communal Studies.
I’m also very appreciative of the millions of small acts of kindness I’ve
received, such as bus drivers that waited for me, very understanding gate
agents, and the freely given train passes, books, bread, wine refills, drinks,
laughs, stickers, seat upgrades, burritos, how-to videos, great plane fares,
films, public parks, parades, parties, theater, beautiful flowers, beaches,
rides, comedy shows, tickets, artwork, high point markers, gardens, friend-
ships in many forms, and so much more I’ve so enjoyed over the years.
The world is a wonderful place. Let’s share it.
vii
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
2 The Founding Ideologies of Soul City, Stelle, and Twin
Oaks 21
3 Pioneers in the Middle of Nowhere: Land and Space 63
4 No Hippies, Please: Members and Membership Policies 89
5 Commune, Inc.: The Perils and Benefits of
Entrepreneurship 137
6 Some Hands on Deck: Labor Politics and Practices 185
7 Selling the Dream: Advertising Community and Business 213
8 Everything Has Its Price: Financing a Community 239
9 The Invisible Hand, or Crushing Fist, of the State 285
10 Conclusion: Meandering Toward Utopia 323
Index 331
ix
A
bbreviAtions
CCS Center for Communal Studies, University of Southern Indiana
(Evansville, Indiana)
KKP Kat Kinkade Papers. Special Collections Library. University of
Virginia (Charlottesville, Virginia)
SCC Soul City Collection, Louis Round Wilson Special Collections
Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill,
North Carolina)
UNC Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, North Carolina)
UNCCF University of North Carolina Clipping Files (North Carolina
Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North
Carolina)
UV University of Virginia Library (Charlottesville, Virginia)
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Floyd McKissick wanted to rebuild Black communities. A group of people
thought the world was ending soon but through innovation they could
continue humanity. A splinter organization read a book about an idealized
society and wanted to create the same community. During the mid-to-late
1960s, thousands of individuals acted on their vision and joined a com-
munal society. While there are numerous, and sometimes salacious,
accounts of communal societies that formed, there are only a handful that
focus on their financial aspects. Yet, how does a doomsday community (as
locals deemed) make money? How does a hippie commune living in a barn
turn into a multi-million-dollar business? Why did Nixon help fund a Black
utopia? This work focuses on entrepreneurship and community building.
These groups offer new ways to reconceptualize labor, architecture, and
community design, as well as to examine the blocks in our current socio-
economic systems that we continue to perpetuate. Although none of the
communities ultimately reached their planned goals, their formations
demonstrate how society grapples with the pains of capitalism, and how
each community developed their own concept of a moral economy.
This work offers an in-depth history of three communities—Soul City,
Stelle, and Twin Oaks—with an emphasis on their financing, marketing,
and entrepreneurship processes. Twin Oaks, featuring members much like
the young, free-love hippies, typically thought of as communards; Stelle,
which had largely white and middle-to-upper-middle class members; and
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2021
R. Schwenkbeck, The Business of Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and
Architecture of Communal Societies in the 1960s and 1970s,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88354-6_1
2 R. SCHWENKBECK
Soul City, composed of mostly middle-to-upper-middle-class African
Americans. The study begins during the boom of the communal move-
ment in 1967, when Twin Oaks was founded, and follows through to the
end of the 1970s, as the United States experienced an unprecedented
period of stagflation and structural economic shifts. These communities
reflect the diversity of people who were dissatisfied with the direction
American society was headed in—often underpinned by concerns over
racism, sexism, the environment, and capitalism—and decided to take the
radical approach of joining a communal society. While these societies
hoped to carve out a space for members to fully live their values, as they
operated within the United States, they were not able to escape the hold
of state policies, nor of capitalism. While some communities felt they failed
for participating in a capitalistic society—sometimes to remarkable suc-
cess—it is important to understand that “market processes cannot be set
in opposition to extra-economic cultural and social forces.”1
The concept of moral economy offers an excellent vantage point for
examining communal societies. First, it explains the development of varied
ideologies about justice, fairness, and relationship to work and society—
different moral economies—as they occurred within communities. There
is a great deal of debate on the meaning of the moral economy, but for the
purposes of understanding the moral economy as a response by communal
societies, Elizabeth D. Mauritz defined it as, “the community based
response, arising from a sense of common good, upheld by custom or
tradition, to an unjust appropriation or abuse of land, labor, human dig-
nity, or material goods, with the objective of producing social arrange-
ments that promote just relations between unequal persons or groups
within a community to achieve long-term social sustainability.”2
Communes were a space that participants used to develop a moral econ-
omy in response to injustice they saw occurring in society.
Secondly, the moral economy lens also explains how these communities
remained “intertwined with and inseparable from actual practices of pro-
duction, exchange and reproduction.”3 In other words, the economy is
1 Jamie Palomera and Theodora Vetta, “Moral Economy: Rethinking a Radical Concept.”
Anthropological Theory 16.4 (2016): 413–432, 418.
2 Elizabeth D. Mauritz, “Moral Economy: Claims for the Common Good.” A Doctoral
Dissertation submitted to Michigan State University, 2014, page 5.
3 Palomera and Vetta, 420.
