Men Against the State

Foreword to the First (1953) Edition By Harry Elmer Barnes

Dr. Martin has made a commendable contribution to American intellectual and social history. American anarchistic thought is an important segment of this aspect of our past. It has been generally neglected, and, when dealt with at all, has more often than not been misunderstood, deliberately distorted, or both. His book is essentially the biography of a social idea pieced together from the lives and thoughts of the men whose individual contributions made it a fully developed and consistent outlook upon life.

The history of ideas tends to concentrate upon and feature those which have been adopted or accepted by the majority or by those in authority. The pragmatic test tends to weed out those which are rejected by the masses or are unpopular with the dominant intellectual classes. The thinking of many minority groups, whatever its intrinsic merit, is still lightly documented and much neglected. As successive established orders and varieties of the status quo pile upon one another, the literary byproduct is the relegation of fringe thinkers to obscurity or abuse. In popular terminology we regularly run across the epithets “crackpot” and “crank” applied to thinkers whose ideas are generally considered too extreme, unworkable or impractical from some current frame of reference. Descriptions such as these have an overtone of demolition, implied or consciously wished, which is often so summary that persons and ideas thus designated tend to undergo dismissal without a scrap of serious contemporary consideration. Dr. Martin’s study is a calculated experiment of a different nature. He does not take the interpretative approach from the vantage point of the contemporary value system, with its often obvious conclusion. The record is stated with a minimum of attempt to produce findings sympathetic with a preconceived reader audience, one of the common failings in the preparation of monographs dealing with intellectual history.

Textbook writers and others whose historical labors are confined to surveys of American history on the grand scale, whose narratives concentrate on the broad sweep of conventional political events or the epics of military conflicts, are more and more prone to brush aside the contributions of the unconventional or the radical elements in society, except in such cases as they happen to disturb the tranquility of the existing order by violent demonstration. The all too usual fate of deviant thinkers whose lives are also characterized by a lack of sensational gestures is rapid obscurity.

The changing fashions of radical thought flit across the world scene in such a way that it is relatively easy for any particular one to drop from sight. In the process, the material contributions and literary achievements of many minority ideologies often sink below the surface of everyday life, unless they reach popularity at another time when espoused by more respectable circles. One of the chief tasks of the intellectual historian is to restore the outlines of these experiments, so that they can obtain proper consideration and evaluation. This is what Dr. Martin undertakes in this study, in which he seeks to document fully the development of an interesting phase of native radicalism customarily described as individualist anarchism.

This type of thought is one of the unique episodes in the intellectual and social history of the Western World in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but until Dr. Martin’s researches it has only been partially put in the historical record. His book is the first full-length study of the individualistic anarchist movement. No other student has so thoroughly examined the obscure source-materials or incorporated them so completely in a scholarly production. It disposes of the persistent illusion that radical thought is mostly an evil alien graft upon the wholesome tree of American life, secretly spirited into this country by dubious persons outside the pale of Anglo-Saxon culture. It further undermines the comfortable delusion that radical thought in this country has been the product of a handful of “maladjusted” persons, the mentally ill, the unsuccessful, inconsequential minds, those nursing imaginary grievances, and the generally frustrated periphery of the social system.

Dr. Martin has not only restored for us a full knowledge and detailed picture of native American anarchist thought but has also given his subject more precision than has earlier prevailed, and has successfully brushed away the smears heaped upon it by contemporary popular prejudice. He shows clearly that the mere fact of resentment against established authority, religious, political or economic, cannot always be properly described as true anarchist philosophy and tradition. Many statements and policies frequently listed as of anarchist vintage are, in reality, closer to the various forms of imposed collectivism which anarchism repudiates. This is as true for many of the early “utopian” programs as it is for the current nostrums masquerading behind the fiction of collective ownership.

In his book, Dr. Martin also fully exposes the unfairness and distortion visited upon the American anarchist movement as a result of the violence of foreign intruders, and occasional quasi-criminals, exemplified by the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886, Alexander Berkman’s attempt on the life of Henry C. Frick, and the assassination of President Mc-Kinley by Leon Czolgosz.1 Native American anarchist thinkers indignantly disavowed the technique of violence, but the smears took hold and still stick, and students of American intellectual history are still reluctant in straightening out the record.

As Dr. Martin makes clear, native American individualist anarchism had a fairly consistent philosophy. This embodied intellectual and social opposition to formal political authority, abrupt refusal to Coöperate with such authority in bringing about reforms in the social order, and advocacy of the substitution of a non-coercive, voluntary Coöperative society for the present social organization. There was rarely any effort made to suggest blueprints or detailed outlines of precisely what such a new anarchist order would be like. It was assumed that it would evolve gradually and naturally after the obstacles and inequities in the present system had been done away with. This transformation was to be accomplished by education and persuasion, not by application of terror and force.

This restoration of American anarchist thought to consideration by literate Americans which Dr. Martin has accomplished is not merely an impressive exercise in intellectual history or extensive indulgence in idle curiosity. The information it provides may have some practical significance for the human future—If there is to be any distant and happier human future. If our society survives the epochs or stages of the military state capitalism of the “Free Nations,” fascism, communism, and the Orwellian nightmare, it may ultimately settle down in some non-coercive pattern possessing many traits similar to the ideal society anticipated and portrayed in native American anarchist thought.

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[The eminent scholar Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes died on August 25, 1968 in his eightieth year. A superlative account of his career will be found in the symposium Harry Elmer Barnes, Learned Crusader: The New History in Action (Colorado Springs; Ralph Myles Publisher, 1968).]

2It should be remembered in addition that the assassination of President James A. Garfield by Charles J. Guiteau in 1881 took place at the time of the similar fate of Czar Alexander II of Russia at the hands of a professed nihilist. Both incidents aroused much comment in the radical press, and later publicists attempted to insinuate some relationship between these diversely motivated and widely separated acts of violence.

• 1It has been evident to thoughtful observers for more than two generations that the words “anarchist,” “anarchism,” and “anarchy” have been used so loosely by writers and the general public alike that they have practically ceased to have any definite meaning. The problem here is similar to that existing in many other cases where abstract terms or generalizations having no or little substance have been overused or misused. Nor has the use of these terms by scholars tended to promote any greater degree of understanding. In too many cases the tendency has been to resemble the weaknesses of the general observer. Here the situation has been usually created by the repeated interpretation of expressions of hostility to the status quo as evidence of anarchist thought.
• 2 An example of the problem involved in the matter of accurately using such specialized words can be found in the interesting study by Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., “The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, IX (June, 1948), 259-302.