Men Against the State

The writing of a history of anarchism in the United States will run into the difficulties created by the necessity of establishing criteria for the purpose of separating anarchism from other expressions of radical social thought which may be allied to but are distinct from it. On the verbal level the most perplexing problem is that of definition of terms, beginning with the basic word itself. In one respect the obstruction may never be bridged. An almost insuperable barrier has been the matter of semantics. The use of the term as an identification for a social order characterized by the absence of the State is quite recent. As used by Pierre Joseph Proudhon in this way, it is hardly more than a century old. However, its association with reprehensibility in this country has generally greatly restricted its use for descriptive purposes. European radicals have been far less inhibited in this way, hence the study of anarchism there is relatively unimpeded by hesitancy on the part of radicals to disclose themselves. Their propaganda has been open and identified, and thus may be readily examined.

The reluctance to openly declare positions which has been a periodic matter of concern in all areas of radicalism in America makes such an approach here out of the question. Thus the problem of discovering anarchist literature and sentiments when disguised as something else. The constant use of less highly-charged words to describe anarchist propaganda is still another situation which is essentially American. In such a way, anarchist doctrines have found acceptance here when identification as the former would have produced a general flight away from it, so sinister have been the associative connotations of the word. In view of such a situation, it is not peculiar that the study of anarchism involves the necessity of escaping the limits of the word itself. On the other hand, the indiscriminate use of the word makes it imperative that all professions of it be examined. A vast number of ideas which have nothing to do with anarchism are often purported to be such, resulting in distortion, deliberate or otherwise.

It 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.1 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

The idea has long been prevalent that violent conduct is characteristic of anarchists, and that anarchism is a doctrine of destruction.3 There exists little justification for such a stand, in actuality. In addition, the rejection of one particular variety of authority in favor of its replacement by another finds continual identification with anarchism, while social philosophies which are utterly opposed to it are on occasion labeled “anarchistic.” This merely adds to the already large amount of confusion existing on the subject, setting up extremely vague limitations and permitting the inclusion of many elements which are quite controversial.

Mere dissatisfaction with or opposition to the existing order anywhere is gravely insufficient to serve as evidence of anarchist sentiments. Nor is a program of pure negation or obstructionism more than faintly related; anarchists are not advocates of replacing something with nothing. An example of presumption is the widespread interchangeable use of the terms “nihilism” and “anarchism.” Actually, the anarchist proposes specific solutions for social problems. His occasional tendency to mask them by encouraging the greater disintegration and decay of the older order may lead to identifying him with an element which desires planless, cumulative revolutionary disorder. But the anarchist and those enamored with perpetual revolutionary dynamism part company long before this.

A history of anarchism, therefore, becomes progressively more difficult to undertake if it is assumed that all that has the appearance of anarchist philosophy as conventionally understood properly comes within the purview of such a study. Careful reflection on the issue leads one to observe that the loose application of the term “anarchy” as a synonym for chaos is a verbal reflex based on a conditioned semantic response. This patently ignores one of the fundamental principles on which most of the varied schools of belief in the ideal of the stateless society are grounded. The last century, with its all-pervading atmosphere of nationalism, has been especially hostile to such thinking, as was an earlier era of religious authoritarianism. And as the problems produced by the conflicting national policies have encouraged the elaboration of totalitarian schemes as solutions, the resistance to anarchistic thinking has grown apace. The belief that abolition of external coercion or control is an impossibility, or at best a probability of the most remote and impractical order, has prevailed, and is now virtually unquestioned. Even among those least satisfied with the structure of world society, the assumption that institutional government is absolutely necessary as a starting point is universally held. The fear of the disappearance of traditional values and modes of behavior thought worthy of preservation without the bulwark provided by institutionalism is expressed implicitly here.

It can thus be seen that the peripheral area of anarchism becomes as extended as desired, depending upon the object sought. It is possible, for instance, to take a running start from the early seventeenth century, as has been done, recording the varied social protests since that time and sifting their content for what may have significance in the delineation of antistatist thought. In addition, the writings of a great variety of thinkers from that time to this may be strained for quotations which have the semblance of anarchist sentiment and connotation when abstracted out of context. Thus it becomes possible, as does Rudolf Rocker, to include even such personages as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln on the fringe of the anarchist fold. It might be mentioned at this point that the area of overlapping of liberal and anarchist ideas is itself a full scale study, which can only be indicated in such a work as this. Even such pertinent figures as William Godwin and Robert Owen can easily be overextended when one is engaged in elaborating the development of anarchism in the United States. And it has been remarked upon elsewhere that when considered from the point of view of a consistent school of thought, the radical writing of even Henry David Thoreau has far more pertinence to the abolitionist rather than the anarchist movement. Thoreau’s pamphleteering was discovered by the radicals a generation after it had ceased, and the extent of Thoreau’s anarchism is a highly debatable matter.

With respect to the United States, especially, the stretching of the term “anarchism” to apply to all the variety of vague and dimly felt resentments toward authority which have been discerned in the history of American dissension from colonial New England days to the present is now questionable. It appears increasingly probable that expressions of well-organized arguments against the State date from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and represent more accurately a reaction to the complex problems produced by the growth of urbanism, industrialism, and the expansion of the modern national state. Observations of isolated expressions containing particles of anarchistic thought can be made, but the difficulty of presenting them in any logical sequence has yet to be surmounted. The element of relation or continuity is absent, and their contribution to a sustained integrated propaganda is tenuous at best. More often than not they are isolated phenomena which lack any central theme or point of polarization.

Since 1880 and thereabouts people have almost universally thought of anarchists in terms of violence and conspiracy. The result has been the regarding of anarchist literature as a product of a handful of criminals. In Europe the advent of this revolutionary movement was accompanied by a number of sensational acts which led to the identification of anarchism with socially pathological developments.4 In the United States there have been similar implications, to the point where even governmental policy incorporated the layman’s conception of anarchism and anarchists. The definition of anarchism employed by the Department of Justice in modern times is essentially derived from this earlier period.

Although the tendency to blame destruction of property and loss of life during industrial disputes on “agitators,” “doctrinaires,” and “communists” prevailed for some time previous to the celebrated Haymarket incident in Chicago in May, 1886, such predilections received a powerful stimulus from this event.5 The now-familiar stereotype of the black whiskered, bomb-throwing vandal came into being at this time and created a new political symbol which has been used to manipulate mass opinion with an impressive degree of success.6 As a consequence of this and other factors, anarchism became so tainted with diabolism that rational study of its place in American history has rarely taken place.

General conclusions as to the basis of anarchist opposition to conventionally-constituted government have more often than not been based on something less than a scholarly investigation of libertarian literature. To make matters worse, the frame of reference, liberal or otherwise, of most writers who have approached the subject has markedly contributed to promoting attempts to demolish anarchism by the polemical method, rather than presenting the record. There has tended to be too much interpretation based on far too little factual data. It was the conclusion of Ernst Victor Zenker, a serious critic of anarchism and writer of one of the few substantial volumes on the subject in the last century, that hardly a critic of anarchism with whom he was familiar had ever read any anarchist writings. Objective writing on the subject is so meager and threadbare that the Encyclopedia Britannica has depended on the anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s article for over a generation and a half in presenting the matter of anarchism to the general reader. Surveys of anarchism such as that contained in Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth are exceedingly rare.

The preparation of this study has taken place with most of the foregoing complexities in mind, and is therefore presented with distinct limits upon its scope. It is made with the hope that it may help to establish a method of approach to the problem of a critical survey of the whole radical movement in America. American history reveals a vast amount of native thought and action which may be arranged under the general heading of anarchism, but much of it is so disjointed and sporadic that no comprehensive and logical picture can be constructed from it. It is with the attempt to establish more universal criteria to make possible a more careful examination of anarchism that this study is also concerned.

When anarchism in its several forms, including its theoretical statements and practical experiments, is analyzed structurally, it generally separates into three broad areas of tactics and strategy; (a) a rejection of constituted authority as the source of social dynamism and equilibrium; (b) a refusal to collaborate with the existing order anywhere through participation in any program of reformism; (c) the promotion of a variety of non-coercive alternatives of quite clearly defined nature as a substitute. Within this framework the various schools of anarchism have developed a number of sectarian variants, and some of these elaborations have created bitter doctrinal controversies. The result has been the erection of barriers fully as steep among the anarchists as those existing between them and the conventional world. The thread of violence which has criss-crossed through this is, however, not an integral part of the fabric. Too often it has been mistaken by superficial observers to be the whole cloth.

Nearly all scholarly attention directed toward anarchism in America has been along political lines. With the possible exception of Richard T. Ely and the John R. Commons associates, practically no one has examined the economics of anarchism. This preoccupation with the political has also been responsible for the inclusion in anarchist ranks of several radical fringe groups and individuals who do not belong there. The most important discussion by an American of the politics of anarchism thus far has been that of Charles Edward Merriam. For over thirty years it has been referred to constantly. The only academic treatise devoted exclusively to anarchism in America, Eunice Minette Schuster’s Native American Anarchism, which appeared in 1931, gives extensive evidence of its influence. Merriam’s studies began with an observation of the similarity between anarchistic sentiments and the expressions of the Antinomian rebels of seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay. The narrative was carried through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, stressing especially Henry David Thoreau, the Garrisonian wing of “no government” abolitionists, and a number of religious dissident splinter aggregations, such as the enclaves of John Humphrey Noyes and Adin Ballou. The survey included a discussion of the individualist-mutualist anarchism, concluding with special attention being paid to the imported anarchism which made its way to the United States from Germany and Russia between 1880 and 1905.

The attempt to link these varied phenomena into a logical sequence has been undertaken by others as well, with less success. It now appears that the assumption that American anarchism stemmed from Puritan Antinomianism and was associated with the peculiar variety of resistance to the state found in the non-resistant and “no government” sentiments of the Garrison school of “Christian Anarchist” abolitionists is untenable. It is more probable that, rather than being a derivative of native American conditions, the real source of the anti-statist evidences observed in Antinomianism and other varieties of early colonial dissidence and unrest can be discovered in the radicalism, both religious and socio-economic, already developing in England before the times of Charles I, and which found expression through lower class spokesmen at the time of the English Civil War.7 Concerning other aspects of this matter, it can be argued quite effectively that the designation “Christian Anarchist” is really a contradiction in terms, and that religious rebellion along individualist lines can be interpreted as anarchism only under highly specialized circumstances. The rejection of one variety of religious authority in favor of its replacement by another can hardly be related to anarchism, which categorically rejects authority. In another connection, the interpretation of American anti-statism as an evolutionary process, passing from religious to economic spheres, is also open to serious objections. There is not only lack of continuity in influence, but no logical sequence in the elaboration of a program of propaganda. In searching the field it becomes more apparent that the elements of a radical movement with a fully developed propaganda structure can be found in one of the sub-areas only. It is the contention of this work that individualist anarchism can be seen to satisfy the requirements mentioned elsewhere. Not only is it the only part of the radical movement native to America with a propaganda, but it has depended on natives for its promotion. Furthermore, it is unique in that members of the group actually attempted under practical conditions to try out its theory.

The heavy weight of European influence has concentrated attention on the development of the anarchism there. The penetration of this type of revolutionary thought into working class consciousness and its emergence as syndicalism probably justifies this, since in this form it has been the only real competitor to Marxism in the radical arena in the last eighty years. However, paralleling it chronologically was a kindred but nearly unconnected phenomenon in America, seeking the same ends through individualistic rather than collectivistic dynamics. American writers concerned with the reform movements of the nineteenth century have likewise paid little attention to it, except occasional notice of it as a symptom of economic unrest. Its evolution from the practical stages as a frontier experiment in individual sovereignty and “equitable commerce” to the theoretical and intellectual pamphleteering of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the major concern here.

In the United States there seems to have been little notice of an extensive literature hostile to the state and its functions until after Haymarket. The dominant conception of anarchism after the violence in Chicago was in accord with the inflammatory utterances of the European-born revolutionaries now gathered in the several large Northern cities. Lack of attention had resulted in the failure to note that a serious split had been developing within the worldwide anarchist movement, and that various distinct elements could now be recognized.8

The semantic smokescreen raised up by the moral uproar here and overseas after Haymarket and a number of sensational assassinations in Europe covered over in the process the uncompromising stand taken by the American individualist anarchists, who deplored the use of force, or “direct action,” and asserted as before their traditional hope of the eventual adoption of noncoercive individualist equity as a result of education and rational conviction.9 Much of what they had to say had been propagated here for nearly a half century before there developed a competing body of beliefs put forward by followers of Bakunin and Kropotkin. In the form in which it appeared during the 80’s and 90’s, but especially as broadcast by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and other Russians after the turn of the century, it is possible to see emerging the full outlines of what has since become known as communist anarchism.10 It has since received its best statement by Italian and Spanish radicals. (Further examination of the famed Haymarket Germans suggests a serious question as to whether these men were not far closer to state socialism, actually, than anarchism.)

The two groups differed sharply on basic issues. The communist anarchists rejected private property, and taught the ideal of the collective autonomous commune. A portion of their number advocated the overthrow of the State by violence.11 The individualist anarchists held that the collective society in any form was an impossibility without the eventuality of authoritarianism, and ultimately, totalitarianism, and adhered resolutely to the concept of private property insofar as the term could be defined as the total product of a given individual’s labor, but not more broadly than this. They abandoned the idea of an equalitarian utopia, and worked for a world free from arbitrary restrictions on opportunity and legal privilege, which breakdowns they claimed “laissez faire” really produced.12 No other radical group denounced the prevailing system more vigorously than the spokesmen for individualist anarchism.

The individualist anarchists had no blueprint for the future of social organizations under conditions free from coercion. The direction to be taken by voluntary associations was left for the future, and no predictions of a static millennium filled their writing. The group had within their number adherents to a system of decentralized local communities of small size, and at the same time proponents of free associations of producers and consumers within large urban industrial centers. The best known of this group of native radicals, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William B. Greene, Ezra Heywood, and Benjamin R. Tucker, came in for a measure of attention during the peak of the furor over radicalism reached at about the time of the Spanish-American War. But the greater part of the attention of the time was focussed on their German and Russian contemporaries, with whom they were already at variance in many respects. Those most familiar with the individualist suggestions for the solution of the currency, labor and other pressing problems dismissed them as the fulminations of a group of irresponsibles, dreamers and cranks.13 Their work along practical lines at an earlier time was practically unknown in any circles, and much of what they had to say later on was mostly forgotten when the stage was taken over by the Industrial Workers of the World, The Socialist Party and the First International.

In undertaking an exhaustive examination of the whole individualist anarchist movement, the present study produces a number of conclusions and interpretations which differ somewhat from earlier piece-meal studies of anarchist thought and action. A few examples may be given. A full study of the known printed works of Josiah Warren has resulted in the dismissal of the previous assertion that Warren was a son of the celebrated Revolutionary War general. The facts reveal only an intimation of kinship at best. In addition, the former assumption of Warren’s originality in promoting the ticket system of labor note currency does not hold up in the face of repeated admissions by Warren himself of the prior sponsorship by Robert Owen. Warren can be credited only with the first practical adaptation of this system. Previous studies, on the other hand, have tended to overlook the numerous community founding attempts under Warren’s instigation, which are fully covered here.

The discovery of new materials indicates that Warren and William B. Greene were aware rather than ignorant of each other’s work. Greene, generally advanced as an exponent of the ideas of Pierre Joseph Proudhon, appears now to have been more a product of the currency radicalism that accompanied and followed the business and financial panic of 1837. His own ideas, which made a permanent impression on American anarchist economics, stand far closer to the thinking of American contemporaries such as Edward Kellogg rather than to Proudhonian “mutualism.” If anything, Greene was more a critic than follower of the famous French radical.

A new factor in the person of Joshua K. Ingalls appears as a result of an examination of the origin of anarchist ideas about land. And at the same time, the major figure in the promotion of individualist anarchism in its mature form, Benjamin R. Tucker, becomes less an original and more an eclectic figure. Tucker is the cultural synthesis of the earlier exponents and innovators of the various elements of which this variety of American radicalism was composed.

No pretense is made of exhaustively investigating the relationships between individualist anarchism and the large number of contemporary fragments of radicalism, regardless of rationale. Neither Owenism nor Fourierism of the pre-Civil War period nor the various socialisms and collectivist anarchism of the latter half of the nineteenth century are treated except where they furnish personalities to the individualist anarchist movement or ideas to the individualist anarchist intellectual arsenal, or opposition to pitch individualist anarchist attacks against. In the history of individualist anarchism these are peripheral areas.

There are distinct and noticeable limitations in the presentation of this monograph especially as a result of the sparse interpretation and the reluctance to throw the subject of anarchism against the broader backdrop of American social history in a more sweeping and dramatic manner. But it must be remembered that the object sought in this case has not been a comprehensive history of anarchism in America. The emphasis has been upon the careful documentation of its major phase. The basic assumption has been that since the thought and action of the movement has been so elusive and inaccessible, it must be put on record fully before its integration in a more comprehensive account of the intellectual and social history of American radicalism can be effectively undertaken.

___________

14  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.

15  Ernest A. Vizetelly, The Anarchists (London, 1911), and Peter Latouche, Anarchy! An Authentic Exposition of the Methods of Anarchists and the Aims of Anarchism (London, 1908), are prime examples of popular writing concerned with anarchism primarily as a program of calculated terrorism aimed in particular to those in high places. Latouche, in his zeal to lay all prominent international political assassinations at the door of the anarchists, even included those of Presidents Lincoln and Garfield. Anarchy!, 238. For vindication of the employment of violence by anarchists, see Peter A. Kropotkin, article “Anarchism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, XI ed., (29 vols. London, 1910), I, 916.

16  There is virtually no credible evidence for the assumption that violence is a basic element of the strategy of the anarchists. In distinguishing between the doctrine and the coercive action sometimes associated with it, the non-anarchist German observer and critic Ernst Victor Zenker remarked, “That the theory of Anarchism is not merely a systematic incitement to robbery and murder, we need hardly to repeat. . . . Proudhon and Stirner . . . never once preached force. . . . The doctrine of propaganda which since Proudhon’s time has always accompanied a certain form of anarchist theory, is a foreign element, having no necessary or internal connection with the fundamental ideas of anarchism. It is simply a piece of tactics borrowed from the circumstances peculiar to Russia, and accepted moreover only by one fraction of the Anarchists, and approved by very few indeed in its most crude form; it is merely the old tactics of all revolutionary parties in every age.” Anarchism, a Criticism and History of Anarchist Theory (English translation, New York, 1897), 306.

17  Zenker, Anarchism, 6. An early and exhaustive inquiry into the matter is Césare Lombroso, Gli Anarchici (Turin, 1894). A German edition was published in Hamburg the next year under the title Die Anarchisten. Eine Kriminal Psychologische und Sociologische Studie. Lombroso’s methods and techniques as well as most of his conclusions have been discarded for some time.

18  Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair, continues to be the most thorough account of this unfortunate occurrence. In American history the identification of anarchism with terroristic activities dates from this time, an impression which neither time nor attempts at rectification of the injustice inflicted at the time have succeeded in erasing.

19  An accompanying attitude has been the double standard which has tacitly been adhered to with respect to the employment of extra-legal violence. No public condemnation accompanied the use of coercion on the part of industrialists and local groups of citizènry, acting in a vigilante capacity, in disputes with strikers and radicals, until very recently. For an account of this matter see Robert Hunter, Violence and the Labor Movement (New York, 1914), 276-326.

20  See especially David W. Petegorsky, Left Wing Democracy in the English Civil War; A Study of the Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley (London, 1947), Chapters I-V, and Mildred A. Gibb, John Lilburne, The Leveller (London, 1947), introduction. See also Mosca, Ruling Classes, 271-272, for the advancement of a cyclical theory dealing with the persistence of anarchist and allied sentiments in the ancient literature of China, India, Persia, Israel, Greece and Rome, and continuing down through the Christian Fathers and the Muslims. The influence of Merriam’s view on subsequent writers dealing with anarchism in the United States is readily observable, however.

21  The 1880’s saw the presence in the United States of anarchists in numbers almost equal to those of socialists. Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New York, 1934), 4.

22  For a presentation of this matter as it came to a head at the time of the badly-ignored Anarchist convention in Pittsburgh in 1883, see Chester McA. Destler, “Shall Red and Black Unite? An American Revolutionary Document of 1883,” in Pacific Historical Review, XIV (December, 1945), 434-451.

23  For brief expert summaries of both “schools” from the individualist point of view see Victor Yarros, article “Individualist or Philosophical Anarchism,” 41-45, and Clarence Lee Swartz, article “Anarchist Communism,” 45-50, in William D. P. Bliss and Rudolph M. Binder, (eds.), The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York, 1908). For an admirable and sympathetic treatment of the European anarchist philosophy and its exponents by a conservative, consult Alvan F. Sanborn, Paris and the Social Revolution (Boston, 1905), Chapters I-VII.

24  For other aspects of this conflict consult Ernest Armand, Formas de Vida en común sin Estado no Autoridad (Carlos Espinosa, trans.) (Madrid, 1934); Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture (Los Angeles, 1937); same author, La Juventud de un Rebeide (Buenos Aires, 1947); Helmut Rüdiger, Federalismen (Stockholm, 1947).

        The growth of totalitarianism and the evident hiatus between the theory and the actuality of mass revolution in modern times has brought an occasional admission of worth in the philosophical premises of the individualist school by the press of the followers of Kropotkin. See for instance the reprinting of the individualist anarchist Ernest Armand’s article “La Société Future,” originally included in L’Encyclopédic Anarchiste, IV, 2611-2614, by the libertarian review Resistance, VII (May-June, 1948), 5-8, in an English translation.

25  “In a world where inequality of ability is inevitable, anarchists do not sanction any attempt to produce equality by artificial or authoritarian means. The only equality they posit and will strive their utmost to defend is the equality of opportunity. This necessitates the maximum amount of freedom for each individual. This will not necessarily result in equality of incomes or of wealth but will result in returns proportionate to service rendered. To base society on the supposition that the laborer of great capacity will content himself, in favor of the weak, with half his wages, furnish his services gratuitously, and produce for that abstraction called “society,” in the words of Proudhon, ‘is to base society on a sentiment, . . . which, erected systematically into a principle, is only a false virtue, a dangerous hypocrisy.’ A hypocrisy, unfortunately, eagerly subscribed to by a weak, downtrodden, and misguided portion of the populace.” Quoted from Laurance Labadie, Anarchism Applied to Economics (a leaflet). Emphasized portions are his.

26  For example, the presence at the Warrenite colony of “Modern Times” of such a wide variety of the most extreme types of unconventional behavior has resulted in the estimation of this experiment in anarchist voluntarism as a gathering of spiritualists, Fourierites, free lovers, Comtean Positivists, and even Swedenborgians. Scarcity of contemporary accounts is in a large way responsible for the confusion of interpretations.

• 1 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.
• 2 Ernest A. Vizetelly, The Anarchists (London, 1911), and Peter Latouche, Anarchy! An Authentic Exposition of the Methods of Anarchists and the Aims of Anarchism (London, 1908), are prime examples of popular writing concerned with anarchism primarily as a program of calculated terrorism aimed in particular to those in high places. Latouche, in his zeal to lay all prominent international political assassinations at the door of the anarchists, even included those of Presidents Lincoln and Garfield. Anarchy!, 238. For vindication of the employment of violence by anarchists, see Peter A. Kropotkin, article “Anarchism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, XI ed., (29 vols. London, 1910), I, 916.
• 3 There is virtually no credible evidence for the assumption that violence is a basic element of the strategy of the anarchists. In distinguishing between the doctrine and the coercive action sometimes associated with it, the non-anarchist German observer and critic Ernst Victor Zenker remarked, “That the theory of Anarchism is not merely a systematic incitement to robbery and murder, we need hardly to repeat. . . . Proudhon and Stirner . . . never once preached force. . . . The doctrine of propaganda which since Proudhon’s time has always accompanied a certain form of anarchist theory, is a foreign element, having no necessary or internal connection with the fundamental ideas of anarchism. It is simply a piece of tactics borrowed from the circumstances peculiar to Russia, and accepted moreover only by one fraction of the Anarchists, and approved by very few indeed in its most crude form; it is merely the old tactics of all revolutionary parties in every age.” Anarchism, a Criticism and History of Anarchist Theory (English translation, New York, 1897), 306.
• 4 Zenker, Anarchism, 6. An early and exhaustive inquiry into the matter is Césare Lombroso, Gli Anarchici (Turin, 1894). A German edition was published in Hamburg the next year under the title Die Anarchisten. Eine Kriminal Psychologische und Sociologische Studie. Lombroso’s methods and techniques as well as most of his conclusions have been discarded for some time.
• 5 Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair, continues to be the most thorough account of this unfortunate occurrence. In American history the identification of anarchism with terroristic activities dates from this time, an impression which neither time nor attempts at rectification of the injustice inflicted at the time have succeeded in erasing.
• 6 An accompanying attitude has been the double standard which has tacitly been adhered to with respect to the employment of extra-legal violence. No public condemnation accompanied the use of coercion on the part of industrialists and local groups of citizènry, acting in a vigilante capacity, in disputes with strikers and radicals, until very recently. For an account of this matter see Robert Hunter, Violence and the Labor Movement (New York, 1914), 276-326.
• 7 See especially David W. Petegorsky, Left Wing Democracy in the English Civil War; A Study of the Social Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley (London, 1947), Chapters I-V, and Mildred A. Gibb, John Lilburne, The Leveller (London, 1947), introduction. See also Mosca, Ruling Classes, 271-272, for the advancement of a cyclical theory dealing with the persistence of anarchist and allied sentiments in the ancient literature of China, India, Persia, Israel, Greece and Rome, and continuing down through the Christian Fathers and the Muslims. The influence of Merriam’s view on subsequent writers dealing with anarchism in the United States is readily observable, however.
• 8 The 1880’s saw the presence in the United States of anarchists in numbers almost equal to those of socialists. Morris Hillquit, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life (New York, 1934), 4.
• 9 For a presentation of this matter as it came to a head at the time of the badly-ignored Anarchist convention in Pittsburgh in 1883, see Chester McA. Destler, “Shall Red and Black Unite? An American Revolutionary Document of 1883,” in Pacific Historical Review, XIV (December, 1945), 434-451.
• 10  For brief expert summaries of both “schools” from the individualist point of view see Victor Yarros, article “Individualist or Philosophical Anarchism,” 41-45, and Clarence Lee Swartz, article “Anarchist Communism,” 45-50, in William D. P. Bliss and Rudolph M. Binder, (eds.), The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York, 1908). For an admirable and sympathetic treatment of the European anarchist philosophy and its exponents by a conservative, consult Alvan F. Sanborn, Paris and the Social Revolution (Boston, 1905), Chapters I-VII.
• 11  For other aspects of this conflict consult Ernest Armand, Formas de Vida en común sin Estado no Autoridad (Carlos Espinosa, trans.) (Madrid, 1934); Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture (Los Angeles, 1937); same author, La Juventud de un Rebeide (Buenos Aires, 1947); Helmut Rüdiger, Federalismen (Stockholm, 1947).
• 12  “In a world where inequality of ability is inevitable, anarchists do not sanction any attempt to produce equality by artificial or authoritarian means. The only equality they posit and will strive their utmost to defend is the equality of opportunity. This necessitates the maximum amount of freedom for each individual. This will not necessarily result in equality of incomes or of wealth but will result in returns proportionate to service rendered. To base society on the supposition that the laborer of great capacity will content himself, in favor of the weak, with half his wages, furnish his services gratuitously, and produce for that abstraction called “society,” in the words of Proudhon, ‘is to base society on a sentiment, . . . which, erected systematically into a principle, is only a false virtue, a dangerous hypocrisy.’ A hypocrisy, unfortunately, eagerly subscribed to by a weak, downtrodden, and misguided portion of the populace.” Quoted from Laurance Labadie, Anarchism Applied to Economics (a leaflet). Emphasized portions are his.
• 13  For example, the presence at the Warrenite colony of “Modern Times” of such a wide variety of the most extreme types of unconventional behavior has resulted in the estimation of this experiment in anarchist voluntarism as a gathering of spiritualists, Fourierites, free lovers, Comtean Positivists, and even Swedenborgians. Scarcity of contemporary accounts is in a large way responsible for the confusion of interpretations.
• 14It 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.
• 15It 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.
• 16The idea has long been prevalent that violent conduct is characteristic of anarchists, and that anarchism is a doctrine of destruction. There exists little justification for such a stand, in actuality. In addition, the rejection of one particular variety of authority in favor of its replacement by another finds continual identification with anarchism, while social philosophies which are utterly opposed to it are on occasion labeled “anarchistic.” This merely adds to the already large amount of confusion existing on the subject, setting up extremely vague limitations and permitting the inclusion of many elements which are quite controversial.
• 17Since 1880 and thereabouts people have almost universally thought of anarchists in terms of violence and conspiracy. The result has been the regarding of anarchist literature as a product of a handful of criminals. In Europe the advent of this revolutionary movement was accompanied by a number of sensational acts which led to the identification of anarchism with socially pathological developments. In the United States there have been similar implications, to the point where even governmental policy incorporated the layman’s conception of anarchism and anarchists. The definition of anarchism employed by the Department of Justice in modern times is essentially derived from this earlier period.
• 18Although the tendency to blame destruction of property and loss of life during industrial disputes on “agitators,” “doctrinaires,” and “communists” prevailed for some time previous to the celebrated Haymarket incident in Chicago in May, 1886, such predilections received a powerful stimulus from this event. The now-familiar stereotype of the black whiskered, bomb-throwing vandal came into being at this time and created a new political symbol which has been used to manipulate mass opinion with an impressive degree of success. As a consequence of this and other factors, anarchism became so tainted with diabolism that rational study of its place in American history has rarely taken place.
• 19Although the tendency to blame destruction of property and loss of life during industrial disputes on “agitators,” “doctrinaires,” and “communists” prevailed for some time previous to the celebrated Haymarket incident in Chicago in May, 1886, such predilections received a powerful stimulus from this event. The now-familiar stereotype of the black whiskered, bomb-throwing vandal came into being at this time and created a new political symbol which has been used to manipulate mass opinion with an impressive degree of success. As a consequence of this and other factors, anarchism became so tainted with diabolism that rational study of its place in American history has rarely taken place.
• 20The attempt to link these varied phenomena into a logical sequence has been undertaken by others as well, with less success. It now appears that the assumption that American anarchism stemmed from Puritan Antinomianism and was associated with the peculiar variety of resistance to the state found in the non-resistant and “no government” sentiments of the Garrison school of “Christian Anarchist” abolitionists is untenable. It is more probable that, rather than being a derivative of native American conditions, the real source of the anti-statist evidences observed in Antinomianism and other varieties of early colonial dissidence and unrest can be discovered in the radicalism, both religious and socio-economic, already developing in England before the times of Charles I, and which found expression through lower class spokesmen at the time of the English Civil War. Concerning other aspects of this matter, it can be argued quite effectively that the designation “Christian Anarchist” is really a contradiction in terms, and that religious rebellion along individualist lines can be interpreted as anarchism only under highly specialized circumstances. The rejection of one variety of religious authority in favor of its replacement by another can hardly be related to anarchism, which categorically rejects authority. In another connection, the interpretation of American anti-statism as an evolutionary process, passing from religious to economic spheres, is also open to serious objections. There is not only lack of continuity in influence, but no logical sequence in the elaboration of a program of propaganda. In searching the field it becomes more apparent that the elements of a radical movement with a fully developed propaganda structure can be found in one of the sub-areas only. It is the contention of this work that individualist anarchism can be seen to satisfy the requirements mentioned elsewhere. Not only is it the only part of the radical movement native to America with a propaganda, but it has depended on natives for its promotion. Furthermore, it is unique in that members of the group actually attempted under practical conditions to try out its theory.
• 21In the United States there seems to have been little notice of an extensive literature hostile to the state and its functions until after Haymarket. The dominant conception of anarchism after the violence in Chicago was in accord with the inflammatory utterances of the European-born revolutionaries now gathered in the several large Northern cities. Lack of attention had resulted in the failure to note that a serious split had been developing within the worldwide anarchist movement, and that various distinct elements could now be recognized.
• 22The semantic smokescreen raised up by the moral uproar here and overseas after Haymarket and a number of sensational assassinations in Europe covered over in the process the uncompromising stand taken by the American individualist anarchists, who deplored the use of force, or “direct action,” and asserted as before their traditional hope of the eventual adoption of noncoercive individualist equity as a result of education and rational conviction. Much of what they had to say had been propagated here for nearly a half century before there developed a competing body of beliefs put forward by followers of Bakunin and Kropotkin. In the form in which it appeared during the 80’s and 90’s, but especially as broadcast by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and other Russians after the turn of the century, it is possible to see emerging the full outlines of what has since become known as communist anarchism. It has since received its best statement by Italian and Spanish radicals. (Further examination of the famed Haymarket Germans suggests a serious question as to whether these men were not far closer to state socialism, actually, than anarchism.)
• 23The semantic smokescreen raised up by the moral uproar here and overseas after Haymarket and a number of sensational assassinations in Europe covered over in the process the uncompromising stand taken by the American individualist anarchists, who deplored the use of force, or “direct action,” and asserted as before their traditional hope of the eventual adoption of noncoercive individualist equity as a result of education and rational conviction. Much of what they had to say had been propagated here for nearly a half century before there developed a competing body of beliefs put forward by followers of Bakunin and Kropotkin. In the form in which it appeared during the 80’s and 90’s, but especially as broadcast by Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and other Russians after the turn of the century, it is possible to see emerging the full outlines of what has since become known as communist anarchism. It has since received its best statement by Italian and Spanish radicals. (Further examination of the famed Haymarket Germans suggests a serious question as to whether these men were not far closer to state socialism, actually, than anarchism.)
• 24The two groups differed sharply on basic issues. The communist anarchists rejected private property, and taught the ideal of the collective autonomous commune. A portion of their number advocated the overthrow of the State by violence. The individualist anarchists held that the collective society in any form was an impossibility without the eventuality of authoritarianism, and ultimately, totalitarianism, and adhered resolutely to the concept of private property insofar as the term could be defined as the total product of a given individual’s labor, but not more broadly than this. They abandoned the idea of an equalitarian utopia, and worked for a world free from arbitrary restrictions on opportunity and legal privilege, which breakdowns they claimed “laissez faire” really produced. No other radical group denounced the prevailing system more vigorously than the spokesmen for individualist anarchism.
• 25The two groups differed sharply on basic issues. The communist anarchists rejected private property, and taught the ideal of the collective autonomous commune. A portion of their number advocated the overthrow of the State by violence. The individualist anarchists held that the collective society in any form was an impossibility without the eventuality of authoritarianism, and ultimately, totalitarianism, and adhered resolutely to the concept of private property insofar as the term could be defined as the total product of a given individual’s labor, but not more broadly than this. They abandoned the idea of an equalitarian utopia, and worked for a world free from arbitrary restrictions on opportunity and legal privilege, which breakdowns they claimed “laissez faire” really produced. No other radical group denounced the prevailing system more vigorously than the spokesmen for individualist anarchism.
• 26The individualist anarchists had no blueprint for the future of social organizations under conditions free from coercion. The direction to be taken by voluntary associations was left for the future, and no predictions of a static millennium filled their writing. The group had within their number adherents to a system of decentralized local communities of small size, and at the same time proponents of free associations of producers and consumers within large urban industrial centers. The best known of this group of native radicals, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William B. Greene, Ezra Heywood, and Benjamin R. Tucker, came in for a measure of attention during the peak of the furor over radicalism reached at about the time of the Spanish-American War. But the greater part of the attention of the time was focussed on their German and Russian contemporaries, with whom they were already at variance in many respects. Those most familiar with the individualist suggestions for the solution of the currency, labor and other pressing problems dismissed them as the fulminations of a group of irresponsibles, dreamers and cranks. Their work along practical lines at an earlier time was practically unknown in any circles, and much of what they had to say later on was mostly forgotten when the stage was taken over by the Industrial Workers of the World, The Socialist Party and the First International.