Conspiring Toward Utopia

During the 1930s, the United States government founded Jersey Homesteads (present day Roosevelt, New Jersey) to help a group of pioneering Jewish immigrants create an ambitious new cooperative community. This utopian endeavor intended to move two hundred urban garment worker families from New York City to rural New Jersey so they could make new lives for themselves. The enclave expressed the back-to-the-land agrarian idealism and socialist ideology of its settlers and the era with modernist art and architecture. This book tells the inspiring yet underappreciated history of the town's establishment, revealing its historical utopian commune precursors and detailing how such an unconventional project could only have been possible at that precise moment because of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's progressive New Deal government support. It is a story about a specific time and place with significant lessons for our understanding of that era as well as our own time too.