Ralph R. Whitehead

Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead was an Englishman of that earnest but wholly transcendental school which worshipped Ruskin and William Morris. He dreamed of Utopia on the banks of the Hudson as Coleridge had dreamed of an ideal communistic settlement on the Susquehanna; as Hawthorne and the Brook Farm enthusiasts had also dreamed in Massachusetts. Whitehead, like William Morris, had a generous purse. He built workshops for potters, weavers, dyers, metal workers and wood carvers; he employed instructors in every craft; he even provided a gymnasium and revived old English country dances.

It was a scheme of disinterested Socialism, and there was no lack of Socialists, not all of them disinterested, who hurried to this Catskill wilderness to assist Whitehead in spending his money. Whitehead knew the world only as it had been described to him in the Balliol cloisters. There was not much “Oxford spirit” among the Catskill farmer folk; they regarded Whitehead as an amiable crank, amusing himself with new-fangled experiments in real estate. The Woodstock parasites, who cultivated long hair and considered themselves disciples of Tolstoy because they wore their shirts in the style of Russian peasants, merely puzzled them. The experiment started about twenty-five years ago; it failed, as every experiment of the kind has failed. Nevertheless, it will retain its place among the Hudson River legends.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1930 Century Association Yearbook