As my fellow citizens in Massachusetts are hard at work protecting their culture from a plague of excessive marriage I am reminded of our history.

Joseph Palmer’s exuberance lead him to wear a beard. His fellow citizens, outraged, tossed him in the slammer.

Amusingly Joseph was a butcher, but latter moved in with Alcott to Fruitlands; a utopian community of “spiritual elite” where they labored toward paradise thru the “narrow gate of self-denial.”

“If Alcott felt Brook Farm was not