7 Questions With Susan Wels, Author of An Assassin In Utopia

 

Susan Wels is a New York Times-bestselling author, historian, and journalist. Her new nonfiction narrative history book, to be released February 7, 2023, is An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder. This true-crime odyssey explores a forgotten, fascinating chapter of American history—leading the reader from a free-love utopian community in upstate New York to the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a former member of the community. It’s the first book to weave together these stories, in a tale of utopian experiments, political machinations, and murder. Susan lives in Northern California and spent more than twelve years researching and writing this book. Her website is  https://www.susanwelsauthor.com/. 

1. How and when did you get hooked on history?

I was an English and journalism major in college and thought that history was just about dry-as-dust names and dates. But when I was in my forties, I worked on a book, called America: Then & Now, that paired old photographs of American events, places, and daily life with contemporary photos of the same subjects. My job was to write brief essays that tied each of the then-and-now photographs together. All of a sudden, I found myself researching historical topics from baseball and weddings to jazz and hemlines, and I fell completely in love with researching and writing history. I went on to write published histories of Stanford University and the Titanic before enrolling in graduate school to get a master’s degree in history, and I’ve never looked back. Researching and writing history is my joy.

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

History has sent me off on some of the greatest travels and adventures of my lifetime. In 1998, after my New York Times-bestselling Titanic history book came out, I was invited to be the correspondent on the Titanic Research & Recovery Expedition. I spent six weeks on a small vessel in the North Atlantic reporting daily about the expedition and weaving the history of the Titanic into my reports. Two years later, I spent nearly two months in Belfast, Northern Ireland, researching the history of the shipyards that built the Titanic. I’ve learned that “shoe-leather research”—actually being in places where the history I’m writing about occurred—is incredibly illuminating. So my research has taken me to places as diverse as Alaska, Hawaii, New York, Washington, D.C., Jerusalem, Belfast, and Geneva, Switzerland.

3. How does history play a part of your professional life/career?

I have been writing history since 1992, when HarperCollins published America: Then & Now. Since then, I’ve researched, written, and published histories including The Olympic Spirit: 100 Years of the Games (Collins 1995), Titanic: Legacy of the World’s Greatest Ocean Liner (Time Life Books, 1997), Stanford: Portrait of a University (Stanford 1999), Pearl Harbor: America’s Darkest Day (Time Life Books, 2001), San Francisco: Arts for the City—Civic Art and Urban Change, 1932-2012 (Heyday 2013), and my latest book—to be released in early February 2023—An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder. Since 2005, I’ve also been editor for the Stanford Historical Society at Stanford University. I think it’s fair to say that history has been my career for the last thirty years.

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?

First, because it adds so much context to current events. For example, the presidential election of 1876—which I write about in An Assassin in Utopia—set the stage in many ways for the contested elections of 2000 and 2020. History repeats, although not exactly, and it can be helpful to see and recognize those patterns. Secondly, it’s great to study history because it’s fascinating. As the late historian David McCullough said, “History is human.” It’s made and moved by human beings whose beliefs, misapprehensions, talents, passions, fears, foibles, and collisions create world-changing events. History is driven by personalities and human nature, and it’s often much stranger than fiction.

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

I’ve spent a lot of time studying, researching, and writing about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American history. The primary sources from that era are deep and rich, and it’s close enough to our own time to make it relatively easy to understand the psychology and motivations of historical figures. But I also love learning about the history of Africa, ancient Rome, and Napoleonic Europe. To be honest, there are few historical topics that don’t interest me.

6. What led you to write An Assassin in Utopia?

I first read about the Oneida Community as a graduate student in history. I was gobsmacked. It was incredible to me that they existed and even thrived in Victorian America. Ever since, I had it in mind to write a book about Oneida. Back in 2009, I was looking for a crime committed by a member, because I thought it would give me a human-interest angle. But I couldn’t find a crime. The Oneidans were upright, respected citizens, despite their eccentric sexual practices, and I got frustrated. But I knew that The New York Times had recently put its archives online, and I thought there was a small chance that the Times would have reported on a crime committed in upstate New York, where the Oneida Community was located. So, as a last-ditch effort, I typed “Oneida” and “crime” into the search bar—and was inundated with hits. I found my crime—a presidential assassination—and knew that I had a book. I spent the next twelve years fascinated and entertained by what I was discovering as I researched every detail of the story.

7. Aside from its effects on Charles Guiteau, was the Oneida Community anything more than an obscure footnote in American history?

The Oneida Community was a prime example of the social and religious experiments that blossomed across the country after the War for Independence. The American revolution shattered institutions and religions, and charismatic leaders filled the void with new, imaginative social structures. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that almost every reading man “had a draft of a new community” in his pocket. The country saw more than seventy utopian experiments between 1800 and 1860. Upstate New York was such a hotbed of these movements that it became known as the “Burned Over District.” And the Oneida Community, which prospered for more than thirty years, was the most successful utopian experiment in American history.