Kagan, Paul, 1943-

Paul Kagan (1943-1993), photographer and author of New World Utopias.

Author of the book New world utopias: a photographic history of the search for community, published in 1975.

Paul Kagan, photographer and author of the book New World Utopia s, was born in 1943. After receiving a degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965, he worked as a television news writer, photographer, graphic artist, and magazine art director. Kagan spent five years researching New World Utopias: A Photographic History of the Search for Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1975). Initially, the National Institute of Mental Health provided funds for Kagan to photograph the remains of California 'utopias'; a few years into the project the California Historical Society gave him funds to research and collect the records and contemporary photographs of those communities. During this time Kagan organized the Utopian Studies Center at the California Historical Society Library (San Francisco). At the time of the book's publication, Kagan described himself as writer/researcher and still photographer for the Television Health Information Project at University of California Medical Center, San Francisco. Paul Kagan died in New York in 1993.

Paul Kagan (1943-1993), photographer and author of New World Utopias: A Photographic History of the Search for Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1975).

History

The Paul Kagan Papers consist largely of documents produced by several California Utopian communities of the early twentieth century. The individuals in these communities strove for a meaningful, humanistic approach to life, which centered on the integral relationship between the individual and the community. Extensively represented are the Llano del Rio community and the Theosophical Society at Krotona, with additional theosophical material from the Halcyon People's Temple, Point Loma Publications, Theosophical University Press(Altadena), Pisgah, and the East-West Cultural Center. Miscellaneous items from an unidentified organization called Fountaingrove are also included.

The Llano del Rio colony was a worker's corporation founded in 1914 by Job Harriman, a Marxist lawyer, as a communal alternative to what he viewed as the selfish competition and materialism of capitalist America. The community began as an agricultural commune in the southern California desert, but expanded to include other industries in its drive for self-sufficiency. One of the enterprises run by the members was a printing press, whose publications were used both as in-house newsletters and outreach proselytizers. As a result of financial and political difficulties, the colony relocated in Leesville, LA. in 1917 where it thrived for some years.

Madame H.P.Blavatsky founded the theosophical Society in 1875, with its headquarters in Adyar, India. Under her guidance, the society's members strove to form a nucleus dedicated to Universal Brotherhood; the study of religion, philosophy and science; and, the exploration of unexplained phenomena. The Theosophists use of psychic phenomena, occultism, and spiritualism in their search for Universal Truth made them constant subjects of controversy and suspicion for the outside world.

The Krotona Institute was one of the American offshoots of the Theosophical Society, a Western Adyar dedicated to theosophical principles. The Institute served as a resident centre for education and training. Members of the Society secured the building site in the Hollywood hills in 1912, and were able to open the school the same year. The centre grew in size and popularity and remained a hiatus for American Theosophists.

Another branch of the main Theosophical Society was the Temple of the People at Halcyon, CA. William Dower founded the organization in 1898 as a result of a leadership dispute in the official American section of the Theosophical Society. The Temple members, too, considered themselves a nucleus for the Universal Community, and as guides to the hidden knowledge of human origin and its destiny. The town of Halcyon functioned as a religious commune where residents received spiritual support while they worked in the surrounding areas.

The Theosophical University Press and Point Loma Publications are reflections of the same theosophical spirit in both tone and content. Apparently the publications from these presses were not connected to specific communities, but support theosophic sympathizers who lived in the normal world.

Insufficient material prevents a history of the other three groups: Pisgah, East-West Cultural Center and Fountaingrove.

Paul Kagan, the collection's donator, used the materials for his book, New World Utopias, before donating them to the Historical Society.

Paul Kagan, photographer and author of the book New World Utopias, was born in 1943. After receiving a degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965, he worked as a television news writer, photographer, graphic artist, and magazine art director. Kagan spent five years researching New World Utopias: A Photographic History of the Search for Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1975). Initially, the National Institute of Mental Health provided funds for Kagan to photograph the remains of California 'utopias'; a few years into the project the California Historical Society gave him funds to research and collect the records and contemporary photographs of those communities. During this time Kagan organized the Utopian Studies Center at the California Historical Society Library (San Francisco). At the time of the book's publication, Kagan described himself as writer/researcher and still photographer for the Television Health Information Project at University of California Medical Center, San Francisco. Paul Kagan died in New York in 1993.

New World Utopias focuses on the history of ten utopian communities in California, dating from 1870 to the present. The philosophical underpinnings of these colonies ranged from the religious (Fountaingrove, Holy City, Pisgah Grande, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and the Theosophical communities of Halcyon, Point Loma, Krotona and Ojai) to the secular and socialist (Icaria Speranza, Kaweah, and Llano del Rio). Kagan also gathered information about six additional, contemporary utopian communities (The Farm, International Re-Education Foundation, Lama Foundation, the Rosicrucian Non-Sectarian Fellowship, Self-Realization Fellowship, and Vedanta Society of Southern California), which he planned to treat as another chapter in his book. That chapter, however, was never written.

Fountaingrove, the earliest of the the religious communities Kagan studied, was established in 1875 by Thomas Lake Harris, founder of the Brotherhood of the New Life and of three colonies in New York between 1861 and 1867. Fountaingrove, described by its founder as a Theo-Socialist community, was situated in Northern California, two miles north of Santa Rosa. Harris was the "primate," or "pivotal man" chosen by God. His spiritualist doctrine included teachings such as Divine Respiration, which enabled the brotherhood to commune with God. Through the efforts of a Japanese-American, Kanaye Nagasawa, Fountaingrove developed a successful winery. In 1891, Harris' complex theories of spiritual counterparts and celibacy resulted in a widely publicized accusation of sexual license and immorality. Harris left Fountaingrove the next year, and the community quickly deteriorated. In 1900 he sold the property to five members of the colony. Kanaye Nagasawa became sole owner in the 1920s, and operated the winery until his death in 1934.

Holy City was another utopian community built upon the religious views of a dynamic central figure, William Riker, who founded the Perfect Christian Divine Way in San Francisco in the second decade of the 20th century. Known as "Father Riker," or "The Comforter," he received communiqués from God through his nerves that carried undertones of white supremacy. He established Holy City ("the world's most perfect government") in 1918, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco. Holy City was situated near a state highway on the way to Santa Cruz, a popular beachside resort, and featured a grocery store, garage, and gas station, which enabled Riker and his followers to take commercial advantage of the vacationer traffic. Riker, a colorful figure, was frequently in court: over the years he was charged with reckless driving, fraud, sedition, breach of promise, and murder. He ran for Governor of California four times, unsuccessfully. Gradually, the inhabitants of Holy City drifted away, and by the mid-1960s the colony was abandoned. Riker died in San Jose in 1969.

Pisgah Grande, located in Southern California, in the Santa Susanna Mountains, was established in 1914 by Dr. Finis E. Yoakum, after he made a dramatic recovery from a life-threatening injury at a prayer healing clinic. Thereafter, Yoakum dedicated his life to God and became well known in Los Angeles for his work with the underprivileged and his belief in the power of prayer. At Pisgah Grande, Yoakum and his followers formed a self-supporting community, distinguished by a hilltop prayer tower, where they maintained a permanent vigil. This short-lived community apparently never outgrew its dependence upon Yoakum's presence; when he died in 1920, Pisgah Grande struggled on for only a year before disbanding.

The Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, founded in 1967, is a traditional Zen monastery in the Santa Lucia Mountains south of Monterey. It was established by the California Zen Center, led by the Center's founder, Shunryu Suzuki. The Center is open during the summer for classes; the rest of the year it serves as a place where a core group of followers meditate, work in the fields, and gather for lectures, following Zen tradition.

The Theosophist Communes of Point Loma, Halcyon, Krotona and Ojai arose from the Theosophical Society formed in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott. The Society based its creed on spiritualism and the occult. In 1878 Blavatsky and Olcott enlarged the scope of their Society by establishing the International Headquarters of the Theosophical Society, first at Bombay and then at Adyar, a suburb of Madras. When Blavatsky died in 1891, a schism developed between the Theosophists in India, represented by Olcott and Annie Besant, and the Theosophists in America, led by William Q. Judge and later Katherine Tingley. The two sections were never reunited, but by the time of Olcott's death in 1907 more than 600 branches had been formed in 42 countries.

In 1897 Katherine Tingley founded the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society at Point Loma, a peninsula in San Diego. Tingley's beliefs mixed humanitarianism with the occult. Members received no wages, and worked at tasks assigned to them on a rotating basis. At its peak, Point Loma had approximately 500 members. The community, a school run according to Theosophist principles, introduced the first Greek theater in California. Katherine Tingley died in 1929; her successor, Gottfried de Purucker, struggled to save Point Loma from financial problems which beset the colony until its demise in 1941.

In 1898, Dr. William H. Dower and Mrs. Francia LaDue of the Theosophical lodge in Syracuse, New York received mystical instructions to shun Tingley's teachings in favor of the original teachings of Blavatsky. In 1903 they moved to a valley near Pismo Beach, north of Santa Barbara, named it Halcyon, and instituted the Temple of the People. There they built a sanatorium, and a cooperative society named the Temple Home Association. The community experienced internal troubles throughout its existence, and in 1912 the cooperative society disbanded. One of the community members, John Varian, whose papers are in the collection, was an Irish poet and musician; he and his wife Agnes lived in Palo Alto and later at Halcyon.

Albert Powell Warrington, an Adyar Theosophist, established a Hollywood, California outpost in 1912, named Krotona. It had few communitarian principles; instead the group shared a common Theosophist philosophy. When Hollywood became too crowded in 1924, Krotona sold their 15 acres of land and moved to the Ojai Valley, northeast of Los Angeles. Here they established a school of Theosophy.

Icaria Speranza, located fifty miles north of San Francisco Bay, was established in 1881 by two French men, Armand Dehay and Jules Leroux. Dehay and Leroux had emigrated from an Icarian community in Iowa, Jeune Icarie, which had been founded on the principles set forth in Etienne Cabet's Voyage en Icarie, published in 1840. At Icaria Speranza each member was given monthly labor premiums based on the number of days they had worked in the colony's vineyard and orchard. The rest of the Iowan Icarians joined them in 1883; however, they encountered unanticipated legal difficulties in selling their Iowa land, which made it difficult for the California colony to get out of debt. As a result, by 1887, Icaria Speranza had been declared dissolved.

The Kaweah Colony was settled in 1885 by the Co-Operative Land Purchase and Colonization Association of California, led by Burnette G. Haskell and James J. Martin, labor activists from San Francisco. When they and the members of their Association filed claims for land in the Sierras of eastern Tulare County, the government became suspicious of the large number of claims and closed the land to entry while it investigated. During this four year investigation, the members of the Association settled near the Kaweah river and made plans to establish a cooperative timber company. The colony was governed by the principles of Marxian socialism, using the concept of the labor-check, a system of currency based on units of work performed. In 1890, however, the Kaweah colonists lost all claims to their land when Congress established the Sequoia National Park, and the community soon disbanded.

Llano del Rio, situated in the Mojave Desert near the San Gabriel Mountains, was established in 1914 by Job Harriman, a socialist from Los Angeles who ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 1898, for vice-president under Eugene Debs in 1899, and for mayor of Los Angeles in 1910. The socialist colony attracted 900 members within three years and established a successful agricultural program, stores, libraries, and kindergartens. In 1917, insufficient water supplies prompted Harriman to relocate the colony to west-central Louisiana, near Leesville. This new colony was named "Newllano"; here in 1920, George Pickett succeeded Harriman as manager. The remnant of the California colony, which had been left under absentee management, was forced into involuntary bankruptcy, placing Newllano under a financial burden. These problems were compounded by the Depression, and in 1935, after a long rebellion against the administration of George Pickett led by Eugene D. Carl, the colony was placed in receivership. Walter Millsap (full name: Leander Walter Millsap, Jr.) was an active Llano "alumnus," as well as an inventor, socialist, and founder of United Cooperative Industries in Los Angeles, who gathered material for a history of the Llano colonies. His papers are included in Kagan's collection.

In addition to these many extinct communities, Kagan studied a number of modern utopian communities, which were still active at the time of his work. The International Re-Educational Foundation is one of many organizations established by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, leader of the worldwide Unification movement. The Foundation set up the International Ideal City in Mendocino County, California, and the International Pioneer Academy in San Francisco. The Rosicrucian Fellowship Non-Sectarian Church was founded in 1911 by Max Heindel at Mt. Ecclesia in Oceanside, California. The group follows a spiritual philosophy based on the occult and pantheism.

The final two groups that Kagan studied originated in India. The Self-Realization Fellowship, headquartered in Los Angeles and founded by Paramahansa Yogananda, is an international religious society based on the teachings of Yoga and a direct experience with God achieved through meditation. The Fellowship operates the Ananda Meditation Retreat, the Ananda Spiritual Community, the Ananda School, and the Ananda Farm, all in Northern California. The Vedanta Society of Southern California, which operates under the spiritual guidance of the Ramakrishna Order of India, is a religious order founded in 1897 by Swami Vivekananda and other disciples of Sri Ramakrishna, who taught that all religions are different paths leading to the same goal. The Vedanta Society of Southern California was established in 1934, and maintains a temple, convent and monastery at Hollywood, a temple and convent at Santa Barbara, and the Ramakrishna Monastery at Trabuco Canyon near Santa Ana.

Paul Kagan also researched two modern utopian communities outside of California. The Farm was founded as a collective by Stephen Gaskin in 1971 in Summertown, Tennessee. At its height there were 1500 members. The second community, the Lama Foundation, was established twenty-five miles north of Taos, as a study center for the awakening of consciousness. The Foundation runs a farm, a K-12 school in Taos, and a summer school.