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Paper short abstract

Based on original archival research, this paper asks what alternative re-shapings of concepts of failure and success the history of the longest standing socialist utopian colony, Llano del Rio, provide and reveal about genealogies of and entanglements with material and idealogical failure.

Paper long abstract

“The colony failed, but failure provides meaning,” (Shepperson 1966:176) Wilbur Shepperson writes in the conclusion of Retreat to Nevada: A Socialist Colony of World War I. Shepperson’s book is a study of Nevada City, Nevada, a socialist cooperative colony of people who opposed World War I and who sought new communal and experimental ways of life there from the spring of 1916 until the colony’s demise in 1918. Today, like other 20th century socialist utopias in the US such as the Llano del Rio colony (first located in California and then re-located to Louisiana), the Nevada City colony contains only a few remains, and Nevada City is but another of Nevada’s many ghost towns. Founded on May Day, 1914, just two months before the beginning of World War I, Llano del Rio declared its existence to be the “birth of a new order of social relations" and became the longest standing socialist utopian experiment in the US though it stands only in ruins today. Based on original archival research on the history of Llano del Rio held at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, this paper asks what alternative re-shapings of history the ruins of Llano del Rio provide. If the same logic and narrative that has conventionally been applied to Llano del Rio—the ruin as a symbol of the experiment’s failure, and an implied inevitable failure at that—was applied to our contemporary physically resplendent ruins, how would that re-conceptualize failure?