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Periodical: Joy

Summary: From Pat Deveney's database:

Joy.
1930--1933? Monthly
Santa Barbara, CA. Publisher: Red Rose Press.

1/1, September 1930. 24 pp., $1.00 a year. The journal was still being published in 1933. This was the organ of Los Angeles Fellowship Farms, a utopian community established about 1912 by Littlefield (1864-1947) at Puente, near Santa Barbara. The journal contained contributions by Mayflower and Ariel, Caroline Parker Smith, Fern Myra Rossman, "Lady Jane," Harold Lloyd Fraser, et al.

Littlefield was a communitarian co-operative utopian from the East who had earlier dabbled with the likes of the Co-Operative Church in Boston and then moved, inevitably, to Southern California where he established himself as a "religious teacher." In the late 1890s he was involved in co-operative social planning with Charles W. Caryl's New Era project and its "plans for the New era union to help develop and utilize the best resources of this country [and] also to employ the best skill there is available to realize the highest degree of prosperity that is possible for all who will help to attain it," etc. The New Era scheme involved assigning each citizen a rank along military lines and an appropriate place of residence in one of the concentric circles of the Model City of the well-ordered society of the future. Caryl (1859-1926) has his own history in the peripheral extensions of the co-operative movement but it is impossible to determine to what extent Littlefield shared these interests: Caryl was the organizer of the Vril Industrial Union (which ran afoul of the postal laws), promoter of a supposed cult that featured prominently the practice of "spiritual soul mates" -- as came to light on Caryl's arrest in 1912. He was a member of the Faithist/Newbroughean colony in Levitica, New Mexico, the "Outer" head of a Brotherhood of Light in Arboles, Colorado, one of the early founders of Levi Dowling's Aquarian Commonwealth of Los Angeles. On Littlefield's death in 1947, the beneficiaries of his estate were Louise B. Brownell and George B. Brownell, the proponents of an Aquarian Movement in Santa Barbara and publishers of the Aquarian Age.

Issues:Joy N32 Apr 1933

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