I found the following note on vegetarian William Frey ...
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[.] William Frey’s social and cultural activities were appreciated at first. Soon, however, a group of followers tried to force the whole colony to accept his doctrine. His zealous adherence to matters of their vegetarian diet caused internal conflict. In the second half of 1884 Frey reformulated their constitution, which was now an “agreement” in which members undertook to share their assets, improve themselves, devote their lives to the principles of altruism and moral activities, which would be realized by all mankind. This agreement was formulated according to the principles of positivism which Frey tried to enforce in the colony. He believed that New Odessa was to become a model positivist colony and presented his convictions as those of the commune.
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William Frey (1839-1888), whose real name was Vladimir Konstantinovich Geins, was born in Odessa to an aristocratic family, educated in a military academy, and served as an officer in the Imperial Guards. As a young man he was influenced by doctrines of Saint Simon, Fourier, and Cabet, left the army and joined the radical underground circles. After years of activity in Russia he despaired of achieving social change in the Old World. In 1868 he and his wife emigrated to the United States, intending to establish a model communitarian settlement there. On his arrival he adopted the name of William Frey and tried to join Oneida but was rejected. In the 1870s he joined some small groups that attempted to establish a commune in the Midwest, but this experiment did not survive long. In spite of the disappointments caused by their communal experience, he and his wife continued to search for an alternative society based on communitarianism. In the late 1870s they were caught up in positivism and began preaching their own version, filled with elements of mysticism, ascetism, and a strictly vegetarian diet. At this stage they met the people of Am Olam and joined them for a while in their colonization venture at New Odessa. On the biography of William Frey see Avrahm Yarmolinsky, A Russian-American Dream: A Memoir on William Frey (Kansas: The University of Kansas Press, 1965).
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" [Oved 1988]
I cannot easily obtain the cited book ("A Russian-American Dream: A Memoir on William Frey, 1965") online.
In 1990, Robert S. Fogarty reported:
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There were quirky visions that were a compound of private vision and biblical inspiration and had a symmetry that reminds one of the sculptural vision of the black primitive artist James Hampton whose construction, “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly,” has grandeur and dignity. Some were jerry-built affairs, while others, such as William Frey’s Positivism, were rational and formal. John Thomas describes all these visions as being part of an oppositional culture [...]
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Longley’s career and the career of William Frey crossed at Reunion, which Frey joined after spending sometime at the Progressive or Cedar Vale Community in Kansas. Frey (Vladimir Konstantinovich Geins) was born at Odessa, Russia, in 1839 into a military family and attended military college only to reject an army career after receiving his commission. He rebelled against his authoritarian upbringing and chose a career in science. The ideas of Fourier, SaintSimon, Cabet, and Owen interested him, and he may have been a member of the Land and Liberty organization that planned to overthrow the government. When he was twenty-seven he went through a severe mental crisis, possibly because of his realization that the revolution had failed. He then resolved to emigrate. In a letter to a friend, Frey wrote; “To the devil with this Russia it only smothers everything decent.” He was attracted to America after reading about the Oneida Community in a St. Petersburg journal. Before emigrating, he married, and, in February 1868, he left Russia for Germany with his final destination America. On his arrival in the United States, he gave as his name William Frey and, after staying in Jersey City, asked for admission to Oneida. Before the community could act on his request (they probably would have denied him admission since there was little in his background that suggested an interest in “Bible Communism”), he entered into a correspondence with Alcander Longley. Frey then applied for admission to the Reunion Colony, stating that he had left Russia because of persecution, the indifference of the government toward social programs, and his own conviction that communism and love of neighbor were the cornerstones for a new society. In March 1870, he and his family set out for Reunion and arrived just as it was in the process of breaking up. It had split over the free love question, and Frey was opposed to such individualism because it suggested immoral behavior. Although ten years later he would remember Reunion as “the most discordant and hellish life" that could be imagined” (and although he had also lost money at Reunion), he was still eager to continue the cooperative life, moving to a site in Osage County, Kansas, where he and Stephen Briggs took the lead in the Progressive Community. Its capital resources consisted of $231.50, one cow, a wagon, and some farm implements. They staked out land on the newly opened Osage Trust Lands in southern Kansas. Their journey from Missouri to Kansas had been slow and painful since they had encountered a fierce snowstorm that caused both Frey and Briggs to suffer from frostbite. At the end of twelve hard days on the road and with now less than $40 in their common cashbox, they arrived in what Frey recorded in his diary as the “promised land.” The men immediately built a shelter against the elements and waited for Frey’s family. His wife and sick daughter arrived after twelve days on the prairie, during which they had slept in the open most of the time. They had carried with them a cot, nine hens, a calf, and a cat!
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Those colonies that exhibited some degree of collectivity in addition to Bethlehem Yehuda were Painted Woods, near Bismarck, North Dakota, and New Odessa at Cow Creek, Oregon. Many of the members of Am Olam had secured work in New York City on their arrival, and between fifty and sixty of them maintained a communal household on Pell Street that was known as the Commune.38 Household tasks were divided and earnings pooled. They maintained their zeal for collective agriculture and kept in contact with Michael Heilprin, who had organized the Montefiore Agricultural Aid Society to help settle refugees and who worked with the Alliance Israelite Universelle to place groups in southern New Jersey. Scouting parties had been sent out to look for land for the Commune group in the Midwest, Texas, Washington State, and Oregon. A member of the team looking at Oregon was none other than Vladimir Konstantinovich Geins, renamed William Frey.
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Notes to Pages 114-23 [...] 41. Edward Spencer Beeseley, “The Life and Death of William Frey, An Address Delivered at Newtown Hall,” 1 November 1888.
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" [Fogarty 1990]
References:
- Fogarty, Robert S. All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990
- Oved, Yaacov. Two Hundred Years of American Communes. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988
