"Socialism in Arkansas"  1858         As you can read in the two excerpts from newspapers below, socialism was once acceptable in Arkansas as long as it did not promote abolitionists and "...other isms, germinating in the north."           Utopian communities of all sorts were promoted in  the twenty years before the Civil War and the two decades following.  The most enduring of these was the Amana group in Iowa, founded in 1840.  Amana morphed from an agricultural commune into a manufacturing commune. Eventually, it was sold to corporate America and endures today as a brand of microwaves sold in the US.         Over the next several weeks, I'll take a look at some of the more interesting and/or exemplary specimens  of ante bellum utopians.            There were "free love" communities with varying definitions of "free love." Most of the defi...