community had a vibrant informal social atmosphere, with nightly walks in the woods, card games, and singing around the piano. Members read Greeley's New York Tribune and other newspapers, agricultural publications, and maintained a reading room. A steady stream of visitors infused new ideas and earnest discussions into the small rural society. The atmosphere of the North American Phalanx and other Fourierist Associations which survived more than a year or two resembled that of a vibrant New England farming village, it was later reckoned. Governance The phalanx's 1843 constitution provided for administration through a central council, composed of a president, vice-president, treasurer, and 12 directors, with the executive officers serving one year terms and the council members serving staggered two year terms. Originally, only stockholders voted in elections for the council, but all members were given a vote in an 1848 amendment. Heads of each series were granted ex officio status as members of the central council. Suffrage was universal both industrially and politically, with any regular working member of a group entitled to vote within that group without regard to gender. Decline The North American Phalanx, like the Fourierist movement in general, was ultimately undermined by its unachievable utopian basis — a general creed which as one scholar observed "promised too much and required too little of its adherents." The disparity between promises of social transformation and economic abundance and the realities of primitive agriculture and crude living conditions ended with the disillusionment of starry-eyed communitarians and their inflated expectations. Work was hard, the process of development slow and difficult, and communal life in close quarters presented a whole host of social pressures which undermined community stability. The Fourierist model of labor division and wage calculation also proved inefficient in practice, with president Charles Sears noting that members of the North American Phalanx were so preoccupied with work allocation and scheduling that "our days were spent in labor and our nights in legislation" — a regimen which sapped the vitality of the community. The community's unity was also undermined by an inequality of workloads and compensation, as Carl Guarneri has observed: "For Fourier, the notion that some Harmonians would work less than others demonstrated true passional freedom; life in the American phalanxes, however, required hard work and self-sacrifice. As their communities struggled through indebtedness, chronic shortages, and crop failures, Associationists found themselves undermined by their own propaganda. ... The