The Great Change: How June of Nineteen Thirty-Two Ended Eighty Years of Communal Life
Near Amana Colonies, Iowa
By the late nineteen twenties the Amana Society's communal economy was under strain. The Great Depression, which began in nineteen twenty-nine, made the situation critical. The community's farms and workshops could no longer generate sufficient surplus to support the entire population.
Younger members chafed at the constraints of communal life. On June first, nineteen thirty-two, the members of the Amana Society voted to reorganize. The communal system was dissolved and replaced by two new institutions.
The Amana Church Society, a nonprofit, took responsibility for the spiritual life of the community. The Amana Society, a for-profit joint-stock corporation, took over the economic enterprises. Members received shares in the new corporation in exchange for their communal stakes.
Individual wages were established. Private property was recognized. And on April eleventh, nineteen thirty-two, about seven weeks before the formal vote, the fifty-five communal kitchens had already been closed.
Families cooked for themselves for the first time in generations. The community called this the Great Change, and the phrase captures both its scale and its ambiguity. Something essential ended in the spring of nineteen thirty-two.
What replaced it was modern, functional, and eventually prosperous in ways the communal system had never managed. But the daily life that the Inspirationists had sustained for nearly eighty years, the shared meals and the assigned work and the village without wages, was gone.
