Short Suck #53: Icaria!: France’s Failed Communist Utopia in America

In the mid-1800s, long before the Soviet Union or Maoist China, a French political dreamer named Étienne Cabet tried to build a communist utopia... in the heart of America. What followed was a bizarre, ambitious, and often comically disastrous experiment involving disease, deception, authoritarian hypocrisy, failed frontier settlements, buying an abandoned Mormon town, and one of the strangest forgotten social movements in U.S. history. For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You can listen to Short Suck #53: Icaria!: France’s Failed Communist Utopia in America online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Short Suck #53: Icaria!: France’s Failed Communist Utopia in America is an episode from Timesuck with Dan Cummins by Dan Cummins.

This episode is 01:01:31 long.

This episode was published on Mar 13, 2026.

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