Men Against the State

CHAPTER V

Heralds of the Transition to Philosophical Egoism I

Warren’s declining years found a revival of interest in his economic and social ideas. A new group of agents in the propaganda of native anarchism was now upon the scene. The emphasis had by this time broadened to include the exponents of other elements of libertarian reform, and the stress was now to manifest itself as a more intellectual rather than purely practical development. There still remained a strong inclination toward expression in the tradition of the second quarter of the century, but the dislocations in all aspects of life produced by the Civil War extended to the radical front as well as to the structure of the conventional domestic economy. The war enormously accentuated centralization of manufacturing, commerce and finance. It hastened the disposal of the national domain. It increased the scope of governmental functions in a variety of ways, which opponents of the state sensed rather than felt. All these incidents contributed toward the creation of the social and economic circumstances which were to become the new battle ground of American opposition to the state.

The literature of anarchism now incorporated the efforts of not only Warrenite disciples such as Stephen Pearl Andrews and Ezra Heywood but also more distant and independent associates, William B. Greene, J. K. Ingalls and Lysander Spooner, whose anti-statist sentiments took divergent paths but retained the same spirit. The dozens of books and pamphlets published by this small group of men constitute one of the lost branches of American literature and form the basis for a unique incident in the social history of nineteenth century United States.

The consummation of the abolitionist movement released into other areas of reform a group of earnest men seeking another cause, unconvinced that the destruction of chattel slavery had brought about the millennium. The new group of anarchists had all participated in the fight against negro servitude, in varying degrees, having been allied to the Garrisonian school. The purely negative doctrines of no-government which had permeated the non-political wing of the anti-slavery movement undoubtedly influenced all these men. Nevertheless, pre-Civil War America had been the scene of tremendous economic unrest, the bloom of Fourierite socialism being but one of the forms in which it had expressed itself. Thus the acquaintance with economic issues tempered the moralism of abolition in the case of the anti-state libertarians, who found little satisfaction in pure negation and avoidance of embarrassing material questions now brought into relief and side-stepped by the abolitionists as a whole. They had long been aware of the distress of the “free” Northern worker in the pre-war era, and now sought the cause of his misery in the economic structure of society. Going back to elementary principles of political economy, Warren’s successors indicted the state in a more elaborate manner, tracing the origins of practically all derangement within the material community to politically-created artificial advantages.

Although not allied in any formal sense, the exponents of the “free society” remained in accord on basic principles which Warren had attempted to demonstrate with varying degrees of success and satisfaction to himself. Their concern centered around an economic order in which the producer would obtain the full total of his production, the development of a system of exchange geared to the cost of production in labor-time, and utilization of land and raw materials on the strict basis of occupation and actual employment. Convinced of the justice of such objectives, the anarchists proposed to prove that such an order was possible from natural conditions, and that the machinery of government succeeded in merely upsetting that which found its own level without special interference or legislation.

Having declared their position, their battle line was drawn up against the specific evils which they designated as the causes of disaffection within the economic community. In their ideal economy, which involved production for use, and free competition so as to find the lowest possible production cost, the existence of anything approximating monopoly and special privilege of all kinds constituted their primary target, and their ultimate attack upon the state grew out of location of the privilege-granting power in the group in control of the machinery of the state. Thus they designated as legislative favoritism the acts of granting exclusive rights to the ownership of land and raw materials, the legal sanction of a particular commodity as the only permissible tender, and the creation of more subtle forms of privilege concealed in tariffs, patents, and copyrights. With the erection of small bodies of special interests whose efforts in the future would thus be devoted toward preserving such perquisites, the anarchists tended to look with undisguised skepticism upon all efforts to repair the continual malfunctioning of the economic system by piecemeal legislation. The resulting temporary expedients might prove highly gratifying to politicians and to supporters of the business world masquerading as “reformers,” they observed, but as far removed from basic principles as before the changes were put into operation.

Differences of opinion existed among the anarchists as to the relative importance of the evils which they saw as productive of most of the distemper of human society. For the most part they persisted in bringing their ideas before the literate public as individuals, although two vigorous attempts at gathering their efforts under unified auspices occurred during the 40 years immediately following the termination of the war. The first of these, Ezra Heywood’s publishing activities, which used Princeton, Massachusetts as its headquarters, spread out over the 25 year period from 1869 until 1893. In many ways it furnished the stimulus to Benjamin Tucker, whose better known venture in the propagation of anarchism spanned over a quarter century, from 1881 to 1908. Both able writers in their own right, their productions cannot easily be separated from their functions as clearing houses for those of their intellectual associates.

1. Ezra Heywood, Pamphleteer

The return of Josiah Warren to Boston early in 1863 and his subsequent influence upon segments of the radicals of the city and its vicinity has been noted. It was in this same year that he was to meet the young Garrisonian abolitionist Ezra Heywood and turn the latter’s efforts into the more obscure channel of radical economic thought. Heywood, a native of Westminster, Massachusetts, and the recipient of two academic degrees from Brown University,1 had become associated with William Lloyd Garrison in February, 1858,2 entering into the anti-slavery movement in Boston with considerable vigor. Having previously abandoned training for the ministry, he disassociated himself from the cause of negro freedom with the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, being also a non-resistant and an opponent of violence.3 The outbreak of bloodshed ended his support of the Northern cause, although he continued to deprecate slavery, and inconsistently, to rejoice in later years at its destruction by the means which he most deplored.

A man without a cause, his meeting with Warren and the reading of the latter’s True Civilization brought about his conversion to the search for the cause of the general phenomenon of poverty. Destined to exceed the master in degree of extremity in his proposals and, on two occasions in particular, to draw from him severe expressions of criticism, Heywood never was to renounce his devotion and respect for Josiah Warren. Twenty-five years after their first acquaintance Heywood was to pronounce Warren “the Thomas Paine of coming Socialism,” and to assert his work “the most influential book issued since 1840 in the United States or Europe.”4

Heywood was unwilling to remain with Warren, or to take any part in the last attempts at colonization which were being contemplated at Cliftondale. The rising wind of unrest had begun to sweep through the industrial workers of the land, heavily-industrialized Massachusetts being concerned no less than any other area. Into the confusion of ideas and suggestions for remedial action, Heywood was content to project the philosophy of Warren’s decentralized free economy. Leaving Boston, he went to Worcester, where his influence among the radical intellectuals was soon evident. Meetings of like-minded thinkers resulted in the formation in August, 1867, of the Worcester Labor Reform League,5 the first of a large number of groups of the unconventionally-minded which Heywood was to front, and the forerunner of two larger and more important organizations of similar purpose.

The bright promise of unionization drew the support of this band for a time. William Sylvis’ National Labor Union, the first noteworthy post-Civil War labor organization, appeared to point the way during their first year. The Worcester group unofficially affiliated for a time, Heywood attending the second session as a delegate at the “New York Congress” of the N. L. U. in New York, September 21, 1868.6 Association with Warren’s ideas had already weakened any faith he may have had as to the permanence of any gain effected through combination of laborers, however, and there is no evidence that his sympathy with the cause of workingmen found any expression at this time.7

Before members of the Worcester associates, later that same year, he began to sketch the philosophy which he had been gradually assimilating. In an address later published under the title The Labor Party,8 he expressed many of the convictions which were to be found in native anarchist literature for the next half century. Heywood still spoke the language of political action, although condemning governmental policies as responsible for much of the disjointed relations between capital and labor, heightening class consciousness, bitterness, and violence. The address is important more as a document in the literature of industrial protest than as a philosophical treatise. Thus he asserted:9

No one will deny that labor is entitled to its earnings, and that it is the duty, both of individuals and society, . . . to render unto all men and women according to their works. Let us also bear in mind that class rule, the centralizing of political or financial power in the hands of few, to the injury of many, is wrong, and that law . . . should cover with the shield of its protection the whole people, especially defenseless workers. It is the violation or these simple, self-evident truths which provokes the widespread, profound and ominous agitation called the labor movement.

Agitation for “labor reform,” he pointed out, was evidence of deep and widespread discontent growing out of “violated rights and interests” and a situation in which the “producing classes” were being economically depressed. It was reasonable to assume, said Heywood, that a society in which those who created the wealth but failed to enjoy their proper share of it was ‘wrong side up,” and the labor reform movement was a move in the direction of setting it aright.

He scoffed at supporters of the status quo, who saw no evidence of the exercise of tyranny on the part of capital, and who brought up the matter of the free contract with reference to laborers. This argument was no longer valid. Capital controlled land, machinery, steam power, waterfalls, ships, railways, and above all, money and public opinion, and was in a position to wait out recalcitrancy at its leisure. The press quietly ignored the driving down of wages, he noticed:10

But if labor, obedient to a sterner necessity, demands more pay, the air swarms with “strike,” “dictation,” “force,” “riot,” “insurrection,” and many other epithets of rebuke . . .

Nor did the adverse sentiment end here;11 “. . . nine sermons out of ten take the side of capital against labor.” Heywood did not subscribe to the theory of inevitable class conflict. He traced the source of all the evils to legislation, primarily through the creation of special interests by monopoly grants and by exercise of the taxing power:12

Government is a northeast wind, drifting property into a few aristocratic heaps, at the expense of altogether too much democratic bare ground. Through cunning legislation, . . . privileged classes are allowed to steal largely according to law.

The presence of special interests, “the third house at Washington,” with their influence upon congressional committees, indirect taxation, creation of tariffs, enormous land grant monopolies, and a money system in the hands of a small group of favored bankers, these were the primary sins which he charged to the ledger of the government.

Torn between distrust of political action13 and loyalty to the general plan of action approved by the National Labor Union, Heywood’s review of proposed remedies resulted in a patchwork of anarchist economics and piecemeal expedients favored by union councils. He was in full sympathy with such issues as reduction in the hours of work, close coöperation between capital and labor in the production and distribution of wealth, direct taxation, low interest rates, and “honest money,” all of which he conceded were worthy “animating principles” behind the formation of a political labor party.14

His declaration for free banking and a labor currency, a matter which he and the Worcester faction had considered independently, unaware of its other champions, indicated the direction in which their energies were to be henceforth expended:15

Gold has served the plundering instincts of the stock exchange too well; it is too efficient a weapon . . . to be longer tolerated as the money of a free and enlightened people. . . . Let us have an American currency—perhaps a day’s labor will be the unit of reckoning . . . but the least we can demand is that money shall represent the visible results of labor; that at least two dollars in real estate shall be pledged by mortgage for every paper dollar issued.

Misgivings as to the efficacy of political action soon assumed the proportions of complete rejection in the following year. A meeting in Boston in January, 1869, of a larger group of New England intellectuals allied to Heywood in sentiment resulted in the beginning of the New England Labor Reform League. This was a group of radicals which swung away from conventional activities in behalf of labor, prompted by the deterioration of the National Labor Union and the death of Sylvis. Within a short time, the policies of the League became wholeheartedly anarchistic, resulting in its moving to the extreme left and remaining there for its 25 years of existence. One of the important factors resulting in this move was the incorporation within its ranks of the services of William B. Greene. Greene was a former clergyman and Union officer, for many years known for his radical writings on the subjects of government and finance, and a personal friend of the French anarchist P. J. Proudhon.

Spurred by the support of Greene, the native anarchist propaganda front swung into action in a determined fashion. Heywood moved to Princeton and established what became known as the Co-operative Publishing Company, the center of anti-statist publications for over a decade. He issued with the collaboration of Greene, the Declaration of Sentiments of the N. E. L. R. L. This brief document was written in an intense style, embracing the declarations of Greene and Warren, as well as his own, on anarchist political economy. As an indictment of the existing order of American society it has few equals in native radical literature of any shade. The partially-utopian tenor of the principal objective of the League, “abolition of class laws and false customs, whereby legitimate enterprise is defrauded by speculative monopoly, and the reconstruction of government on the basis of justice and reciprocity,”16 shielded a number of far more specific condemnations of industrial, financial and governmental practices and policies destructive to the degree of freedom insisted upon by anarchism. In an economic sense, little was ever said thereafter which succeeded in making a significant addition to this pronunciamento:17

Free contracts, free money, free markets, free transit, and free land—by discussion, petition, remonstrance, and the ballot, to establish these articles of faith as a common need, and a common right, we avail ourselves of the advantages of associate effort . . .

summed up the program of the League, and in distinctive language Heywood established the theoretical basis upon which these convictions were founded. Land, including all mineral, animal and vegetable categories as they existed in nature were declared to be held in common;18 “property, as an original motive power, earns nothing,” logically reducing the matter of price to labor cost, a stand in complete accord with Warren.19 The phenomenon of poverty, widespread and increasing among the “laboring classes,” was no inseparable concomitant of civilized society, doomed to be thus by some inscrutable force, but grew out of “the claim to own and sell what one has not earned.”20 Thus developed the familiar system of doing business, which he condemned as “a species of piracy, wherein there is not only no intention to render equivalent for equivalent, but studied effort to get the largest possible amount of another’s service or property, for the least possible return.” He thus proscribed the business system as a “science of overreaching,” which gradually served to absolve persons of any moral responsibility, fostered fraud, and promoted thereby the belief that honesty was an impossibility. The logical outcome was thought to be the embedding of the notion that poverty, crime, and war were perennial “necessary evils.”

What were the devices by which a portion of society made a living without working? Heywood saw them as the well-intrenched and legally-sanctioned features of economics,—rent, profit and interest, when they represented neither “work done or risk incurred,” and he demanded that they be abolished. To “make money otherwise than by earning it is the business of counterfeiters,” was his scathing comment with relation to their ultimate results. The declaration did not explain how the League anarchists arrived at such conclusions. Payment of interest over and above the face value of a given debt was denounced, and full individual responsibility for all contracts entered into demanded. It re-asserted the demand that free banking be permitted, and that the monopoly of banking be destroyed, thus obviating necessity of the usury laws.21

The declaration closed with a statement of other aims of the N.E.L.R.L.: removal of tariffs; provision for free public markets in the centers of commerce where transactions might be carried on in much the manner of the Owenite Labor Exchanges,22 with the use of labor note currency, and removal of the express, railroad and telegraphic lines from monopoly ownership so that their services might be furnished to patrons at cost. This was expected to occur as a consequence of free competition carried to its logical conclusion.

Heywood’s first faltering and exploratory adventures in the material philosophy of native anarchism, with its emphasis on free competition and access to all raw materials and the exchange of goods on the basis of cost as nearly equated as possible with labor time spent in production, was followed by a flood of small paper-bound books from the Princeton press under his authorship. Featured by short, terse titles and reinforced with quotations from numerous authorities in the field of political economy, these booklets contributed a substantial boost to the intellectual propaganda of the movement which the League began to develop. Casti-gation of the government as the fountainhead of economic disorder grew in intensity thereafter, the Heywood writings furnishing the stimulus for the classic phrasing of the Tucker group a generation later. Yours Or Mine, published in 1869, and Hard Cash, five years later, contained the germ of his economic and political anti-statist thought. These were accompanied by an edition of Greene’s Mutual Banking under the League’s sponsorship in 1870, followed a short while later by the famous Uncivil Liberty. In this Heywood stated his unorthodox views on the woman’s rights question, a matter to which he later devoted the major part of his energies.

Yours Or Mine attempted to solve the problem of property ownership. It was an investigation of the basis upon which property was held and the reasons why it was inequitably distributed. The labor reform movement should seek “fundamental equity,” he said, and not become another “assault on vested interests,” a “raid of the have-nothings upon the have-somethings.”23 The origins of property became lost in the origins of society itself, the source of derivation being obscure from the point of view of the political economist.24 Heywood believed that occupancy and use were the real valid titles to ownership, despite the fact that society acquiesced in other claims to ownership in the belief that such deference performed some benefit to the ‘general welfare.” However, property built up as a result of the profit process he declared inadmissible to the discussion of equity, with the exception of “work done, or risk incurred.” Profit-taking was an injustice which ranked second only to legalizing titles to absolute ownership of land or raw materials. The latter he denounced as “the most gigantic fraud ever perpetrated by human avarice,” and “the first and most fruitful source of speculative accumulation.”25 Though sanctioned by religion, literature, and public opinion, he believed the status of both was located in and enforced by government,26 but which made them none the less false. The resale of land he considered a kind of “stealing,” when it involved profit as a result of “rise of values.” Monopoly, and not “society” was responsible for the rise of land values, he asserted, a point which the anarchists stressed in their critique of Henry George in the pamphleteering of the 80’s.

Concerning the item of rent, Heywood entered a rather novel argument. Property was an artificial creation, he said, and as such had no inherent power of increase. The owner of a house had no right to rent

once the building had paid for itself, beyond the cost of the labor in transferring, insurance, and repair of natural deterioration. It was not fair to figure rent as a one way proposition. A house once paid for, when returned by the lessee after the period of occupation in original condition, not only was not subject to payment of rent, but was actually due a recompense. Heywood reasoned that if empty, natural decay would have occasioned the owner substantial repair costs with no revenue being received during this untenanted interim. A renter who returned property in its original condition was worthy of as much consideration as was the owner. This standard was equally applicable to all goods when loaned, he insisted, as all wealth was perishable to a greater or lesser degree.27

If absolute ownership of land began the process of progressive inequality of wealth, the institution of an ‘exclusive” currency as a cause was not far behind. Interest, like rent, was to Heywood nothing else than another tax on labor. It was made possible only by the ability of a few to control money:28

Since money is the common measure of products, and exchanges must be made in the accepted currency, it is apparent that if speculation control this medium, dictating its nature, amount, and value, they are masters of both labor and trade, and can tax us on the chance to do business, and also for the privilege of living.

Heywood called legal tender “class currency,” since it did not represent all the property in the nation, as he felt it should, but only the property of those who issued it.29 It was useless to oppose high rates of interest, Heywood said, while defending low rates. All payment beyond labor and risk was no better than extortion. It was no more consistent to support some interest-taking than it was to hold that slavery was wrong in ten states but right and constitutional in two or three. “Interest must be adjudged crime in the court of conscience,” he pronounced, “and the right to meddle with it carries with it the right to abolish it altogether. . . . Since all equitable exchange is simply exchange of services, interest, being the monopoly price of money, should be an outlaw in economical science.”30 Heywood applied the same reasoning to the national debt. It was his contention that interest payments on the debt constituted an installment upon the principal, and that the debt was no longer valid once its face had been paid in interest. Carrying over such taxation as was represented by a national debt and imposing it upon succeeding generations was actually the maintenance of a system of involuntary servitude.31

By the time Heywood published Hard Cash, his acquaintance with radical literature included the violently anti-government pamphlets of Lysander Spooner as well as the economic treatises of Warren and Greene, his views reflecting the No Treason32 series of the former to a marked degree. In many ways it was the most extreme of all native anarchist writings to come from the Princeton press.

Heywood’s incursion into the field of relative values was made primarily as an assault upon the limited commodity basis of money and as a plea for the free currency of the mutual bank. Anything that had exchangeable value was money, and property had exchangeable value; hence all property was money, and governmental decrees were of no import in the face of this actuality. Gold and silver owed their use as a money to their value as property and not to any other supposed value. However, if two men chose to pay their debts in other “values,” the actual bills used mattered little as long as they represented tangibles, regardless of the standard which was used to express them.33

“Capitalists object to trade unions of working people,” he observed laconically, “but there is a trades-union of moneylenders of infinitely greater, more oppressive and fraudulent power, than any combination ever devised among working people.”34 He was under no misconceptions as to the influence of such ideas as his and those of the Labor Reform League among financiers, in spite of the vigor of the convictions expressed; “. . . despotism holds almost undisputed sway in finance, scoffing at dissent as puerility and patronizing equity as the whim of visionary reformers.”35 Heywood was sure that a national currency system was not the answer to the needs of commerce. The state as the sole issuer of money was a prospect that he did not entertain with any enthusiasm,36 since he no longer considered the “government” as an abstraction, but as a group of very real men whom he saw silently acquiring control of this new and powerful financial arm. It was for this reason that he reproached the remnants of the National Labor Union37 for its espousal of the national currency plan of Edward Kellogg. Other aspects of the activities of unionization, including the eight hour law campaign, he looked upon as “well-meant protests against existing abuses, and serviceable in their way,” but he remained devoted to the idea of an industrial age of freedom under a system of “free land and free money.”

The influence of Ezra Heywood’s writings is hard to determine accurately. Despite the fact that some of his pamphlets sold from eighty to a hundred thousand copies, it is apparent from his style and vocabulary that his efforts were directed to a level of intelligence and comprehension far above average. His importance as a catalyst in radical circles in the 70’s, however, cannot be wholly ignored. It was his tireless work as corresponding secretary that kept the New England Labor Reform League in existence. The League held bi-annual meetings, generally in Boston but once in à while in such Massachusetts cities as New Bedford and Framingham, for 24 years after the original gathering in January, 1869. It gradually became dominated by anarchist thought, but its activities continued to attract many elements of the labor and intellectual radical fronts, and maintained relations with Susan B. Anthony’s National Woman’s Suffrage Association and the National Labor Union for a few years. Prior to the 1872 election the N. E. L. R. L. broke with these organizations,38 mainly through Heywood’s insistence, but sympathy with individuals from diverse bodies quite distant from the anti-state partisans was evident in almost all its undertakings.39 John Orvis, leader of the Sovereigns of Industry, became its president in 1873. Succeeding meetings were attended by such persons as Bronson Alcott, Lysander Spooner, Greene, and Charles T. Fowler.

Although taking little part in the formalities during the early years, Heywood was always present, and acquired a reputation for his many resolutions setting forth individualist doctrines. His speeches had some of their old abolitionist flavor, and the exuberant and sensational declarations they contained brought upon him the upbraiding of the daily press, especially in Boston. The Post characterized the speeches at the 1873 convention of May 25 and 26 as “levelling harangues,” while the Globe considered their program one of “social incendiarism.” The Advertiser described the League itself as “distemper of reform,” and all condemned its program as encouraging the self-consciousness of the “workmen” and serving to set them apart as an “exclusive class.”40

Heywood himself was unaffected by adverse criticism, recalling to his listeners and readers that he had been previously labeled a fanatic and incendiarist while associated with Garrison. At the convention in New Bedford in the fall of 1873 he declared that labor reform was a part of the old struggle against chattel slavery. Speculation, rent, interest, and dividends had now taken the place of the lash as the means of depriving laborers of their rightful earnings. “The labor movement is not a struggle for a ten or an eight hour law, a theory of finance or cooperation merely, but an effort to make equity the ruling principle of business and politics.”41

The N. E. L. R. L. began to attract the attention of non-New Englanders soon after its meetings received notice in the nation’s press. The League was intended to be local in character but Heywood undertook to bring to its support all potential adherents. Plans for a New York convention of intellectuals were made which culminated in a three day gathering in May, 1871. The American Labor Reform League was launched at this meeting, and henceforth met annually in New York. It included many shades of native radical opinion, but was dominated by the New England anarchists until 1893. The A. L. R. L. was an eclectic gathering of non-political radicals, in many ways reflecting the confusion and indecision of similar independent groups in the face of a trend toward more centralization in all aspects of American life. The trend was one which advocates of various schemes of social simplification were well aware of, but which they were unable to exert influence upon in any appreciable manner.

The slate of officers elected at the 1872 convention indicates the degree of heterogeneity which the League meeting in New York encompassed. Greene, an anarchist, became president. The vice presidents were Orvis of the Sovereigns of Industry, the Fourierite socialist Albert Brisbane, and the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Heywood remained as the omnipresent corresponding secretary, while Stephen Pearl Andrews, Victoria Woodhull, and the old land reformers J. K. Ingalls, Lewis Masquerier and Henry Beeney all held honorary posts.42 During the next few years a variety of other reform representatives became affiliated with the A. L. R. L. in one capacity or another. These included the Owenite socialist John Francis Bray, the labor leader A. W. St. John, and another representative of the Evans school of land reformers and former associate of Josiah Warren, William Rowe.43

The cross-current of opinion stirred up in the meetings of the N. E. L. R. L. and wide correspondence in response to his libertarian pamphlets brought Heywood into action on a third and eventually much more widely known aspect of anarchist propaganda. This was as editor of a periodical devoted to spreading the ideas of the men with whom he became associated as a result of his other interests. In May, 1872, Heywood issued the first number of The Word, a four page monthly sheet, bearing the subtitle “A Monthly Journal of Reform.” It was intended to be an organ in which views of the members of the two Reform Leagues could be expressed, regardless of whether or not they adhered to Heywood’s economic and social philosophy. He listed as contributors, William B. Greene, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Josiah Warren, John Orvis, Victoria Woodhull, Albert Brisbane, John Humphrey Noyes, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William Denton, Frederick William Evans, Wendell Phillips, and Henry Ward Beecher. The policy of the paper was summed up in this prospectus:44

THE WORD favors the abolition of speculative income, of woman’s slavery, and war government; regards all claims to property not founded on a labor title as morally void, and asserts the free use of land to be the inalienable privilege of every human being—on having the right to own or sell only his service impressed upon it. Not by restrictive methods, but through freedom and reciprocity, THE WORD seeks the extinction of interest, rent, dividends, and profit, except as the represent work done; the abolition of railway, telegraphic, banking, trades-union and other corporations charging more than actual cost for values furnished, and the repudiation of all so-called debts the principal whereof has been paid in the form of interest.

Heywood’s paper failed to keep the celebrities listed above as steady contributors. It soon gained a reputation as a radical sheet, however, and enjoyed wide circulation, with subscribers in every state in the Union, Europe and even in South Africa.45 Each issue carried an impressive list of letters to the editor on a wide variety of subjects occasioned by discussion in previous issues. A separate department of the paper, bearing the heading “The Opposition,” carried full comments of Heywood’s critics in the daily press. This was an unusual policy, in view of the marked sensitivity of the radical movement as a whole to adverse criticism. The labor policies of the Reform Leagues tended to stress more and more the uncompromising economic views of their anarchist members, while The Word began to assume the appearance of a personal organ for the expression of the Heywood stand on all matters pertinent to the radical movement. Despite this trend there continued to be much controversial material in the paper, and many of Heywood’s personal friends and fellow anarchists used its pages to bitterly oppose his stands on some things.

In the first issue of the paper, Heywood warmly approved the declarations of the International Workingmen’s Association at its gatherings in Belgium and Switzerland, especially those which called upon the members everywhere to “obliterate” nationalism and “abolish” patriotism, which he called “the most barbarous and stupid of virtues.” He sounded one note of disapproval, however, reflecting the bitter dispute which had already split the anarchist and socialist factions in Europe: “It is not pleasant to see Dr. Marx and other leaders of this great and growing fraternity lean so strongly toward compulsory policies. If the International would succeed it must be true to its bottom idea—voluntary association in behalf of our common humanity.”46

The following month the stamp of approval was placed upon a measure in direct opposition to anarchist principles. This was the proposal of John H. Keyser for a graduated income and estate tax ranging from one-half of one per cent on incomes of $5000, to 50% on everything above $5 million.47 He followed this with an attack upon philanthropy, in which he questioned the basis of all large fortunes and the apparent magnanimity of their possessors:48

Where did the George Peabodys, the Peter Coopers, and others of the alms-giving class of philanthropists get the money which they presume to “give” away as their own? . . . The “poor” whom these philanthropists become so conspicuously distinguished by befriending are really the creators of the wealth they humbly receive as a gift; and, if equity prevailed, their now acknowledged “benefactors” might themselves be subjects of “charity.” To alleviate suffering is praiseworthy, but to assist in creating in manifold forms the misery one gets credit for assuaging is a “deed” which . . . cannot be approved of.

His stand on the land question, which already was under fire from his erstwhile teachers, Warren and Greene, found a companion ground of disagreement through his insertion in The Word of the ultra-feminist point of view on behalf of Victoria Woodhull and her protagonists, which included her sister Tennie Claflin. The core of their propaganda was a frontal attack on the institution of marriage as one lacking justice and equality. Heywood himself entered this violent controversy on the side of the femininists, his pamphlet Uncivil Liberty containing a number of explanations of the “woman movement.” He also endorsed woman suffrage,49 at a time when fellow opponents of government were already declaring the futility of voting.

Warren, in retirement but an occasional contributor to both The Word and Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, was a resident at Heywood’s home for a time, even though he disagreed with him on most every other issue besides the basis of land ownership. These included the attack on possessors of large fortunes, the graduated tax proposal, and the abuse of the eight hour day agitation and the Massachusetts Labor Union.50 Embarrassed by the policies which Heywood and Mrs. Woodhull, as well as the N. E, L. R. L., proclaimed, the aging progenitor of anarchism in America gave vent to expressions of unmistakable dissatisfaction before breaking formal relations with all and retiring to Charlestown, Mass., to the home of Edward Linton.51

Although a severe critic, Warren was not an exponent of the conspiracy theory of society, which Heywood now was inclined to support. He upbraided Heywood for what he styled “hasty and injudicious” language and impatience with those who did not understand the principles of equity and put them into complete practice at once. The language used in The Word was apt to repel many potential friends, he cautioned, although he hoped that new readers would understand the use of the terms as employed by the editor.52 In like manner he opposed the uncompromising war upon state marriages; not only were there many persons who preferred being married thus, but there existed the potential misinterpretation by the popular press, a matter which was of great concern to Warren by this time.53 Referring to the land question, Warren doubted the need for the assault upon legal land titles. He continued to stand by the earlier position that land speculation would cease if all land were sold at the price paid by the original buyer in all subsequent transactions involving the same piece of land.54 Warren, however, proposed no tactics which might be utilized in effecting such a reform, whereas Heywood suggested a combination of “squatter sovereignty” and passive resistance, the latter of these two being used with great effectivensss by the Irish Land League against absentee English landlords at a later time.

Warren feared wealth, and felt that an effort to secure a graduated income tax would be defeated through the efforts of capital, as well as possibly resulting in a considerable degree of violence. Even if it were placed in operation, he doubted that the officials in charge of raising and utilizing the funds designated would escape immersion in wholesale graft.55 At the same time, he warned against stressing class distinctions in reference to possessors of wealth, or “the successful in the general scramble,” as he chose to designate the rich. He felt that ignorance was more responsible for misery than was purposeful design on the part of a scheming minority; he saw all becoming oppressors in turn. In the absence of a system of “equitable compensation,” a man might be living on the “profits” made from his particular business, and at the same time be receiving as little as a tenth of what actually belonged to him in equity. Hence to denounce all profit-takers as “thieves and robbers,” as was occasionally the case at the Labor Reform League meetings, was erroneous and unfair.56

Censure by both Warren and Greene57 had little effect upon the course of Heywood’s conduct of The Word or his participation in the Reform Leagues. His admiration for their writings was equalled only by his indifference to their criticisms as he continued an energetic campaign of writing and speaking on an independent basis. Having expressed himself in a number of ways which even his preceptors considered extreme, he was to continue expounding the economic and social principles he had obtained from them, enlarging the scope of his attentions month by month to include or reject such fragments of the radical movement as he chose with which to align himself. In July, 1874 he formally broke with Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly as a result of attacks on The Word and the N. E. L. R. L. stand on interest, banking, individual sovereignty and majority rule.58 In succeeding years he severely criticized Orvis, Brisbane, and the whole structure of Fourierite59 socialism. He singled out for particular disparagement the National Labor Union, Edward Kellogg, and the Greenback movement,60 which he conceived as serving at best to clear the way for a system of free banking. He was convinced now that the major task of “labor reform” was the abolition of property in land61 and not the creation of a free money structure, thus taking sides in a controversy over which radicals haggled for the next three decades.

Heywood was characteristically impatient with and abusive of the restraint of liberal reform. His treatment of Washington Gladden’s Working People and Their Employers is an excellent illustration. Although believing that it might be read with profit, he thought press reviews had been far more complimentary than the book deserved and that Gladden had presented no adequate solution of the difficulty at hand. He was incensed because he believed Gladden had misrepresented the radicals and had intimated that no portion of the radical reform group felt friendly to a peaceful settlement of the labor question. In addition, he considered Gladden’s favorable quotation of Herbert Spencer, who misunderstood the stand of Proudhon with respect to present holders of wealth, indicated to the average reader that the anarchists advocated forcible dispossession, a matter concerning which the anarchists felt particularly sensitive.62

The outbreak of the railroad strikes in the summer of 1877 brought an immediate response from Heywood. He followed a series of editorials with a booklet, The Great Strike, which furnished an opportunity for a summary of anarchist economics as interpreted by the Labor Reform group, as well as for a statement from the anti-government wing on the separate items of striking, violence, and the attitude toward the state and capital in times of industrial disputes. Heywood was convinced that the execution of the “Molly Maguires,” just a month before the first of the strikes occurred, was of utmost significance. He insisted that their arrest, trial and conviction had been based on evidence which no court in the land would have taken against any man of wealth or social prominence. He believed that the whole case had been “worked up” against the Mollies by the Pinkerton Detective Agency at the express order of the railroad interests with a deliberate intention of removing them permanently;63 “. . . These eleven manual laborers . . . were put out of life with a ferocity which shocked the civilized world.” The ensuing strike was partially in the nature of a reaction to this initial act of violence. This oversimplification of the cause of a complex, nation-wide affair served to highlight Heywood’s hate of the railroad companies and their collaboration with the government.64

Heywood recognized the Pittsburgh strikers as “morally lawful belligerents” engaging in “defensive warfare,” even though he disagreed with them diametrically in philosophy:65

The different sections of the Labor Reform movement with which I have the honor to serve do not think the destruction of life or property a judicious method of advancing any reform. We reject the philosophy of strikes, oppose trades-union monopolies of labor, and discard every other style of associative or legislative intrusion to settle this question. Personally a non-resistant, I would not take another’s life to save my own. Asking no favors for labor but that it be left alone, I seek to abolish capital—. . . by unrestricted enterprise, by peaceful methods of evolution . . .

He deplored the use of coercion by the government and the employers to put down the strike as “ill-advised and abortive.”66 Such a course of conduct in the future with the intention of obtaining obedience or agreement he believed would be a total failure and would result in less harmony than had existed before. This eruption was but the beginning of a long contest, which no amount of violence would abate. The only conditions which would produce tranquility once more would be the total abolition of property in land and raw materials, and the removal of all restrictions on exchange, the “free land and free money” program.67

On November 3, 1877, Heywood was arrested while speaking in Boston by Anthony Comstock, and charged with the violation of postal statutes relative to the circulation of obscene material through the mails. This was the first of three prosecutions of Heywood by the federal government on such charges, on two of which he was convicted and served terms in prison. The subtle degrees by which The Word had been transformed from a labor reform to a “love reform” paper cannot be detailed, even though there had been a growing body of members of Heywood’s subscribers to whom the matter of female independence before the law was of paramount importance. Once he took up the fight for the extension of women’s rights with the primary intention of removing women from economic subjection, he found himself drawn more and more into the display of material of somewhat intimate nature which clashed vioelntly with the morality attitudes reflected in the Comstock laws. The unusual approach of several of his women correspondents, including his own wife, the former Angela Tilton, a radical in her own right, soon brought the paper unusual notoriety. His arrest was merely a matter of time, in the minds even of his friends.

Heywood was sentenced to two years at hard labor on June 25, 1878,68 an event which stirred up many elements of liberal and radical thought throughout the East. A mass meeting of 6000 people, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the emancipation of the West Indies slaves, culminated with a demonstration in Faneuil Hall in Boston on August 1, demanding Heywood’s release and the repeal of the Comstock laws. Presided over by the old abolitionist, Elizur Wright, the speakers included J. H. W. Toohey, president of the National Defense Society, the principal opponent of the Comstock-dominated Society for the Suppression of Vice. Other prominent participants were Laura Kendrick, J. M. L. Babcock, Moses Hull and Thaddeus B. Wakeman, the latter the author of a petition for the repeal of the Comstock laws which obtained 70,000 signatures.69 Heywood was released from prison the following December 19, and pardoned by President Hayes the next day, political influence supplementing the storm of protest emanating from free thought and liberal circles.70

Arrested a second time in the fall of 1882, Heywood was acquitted in Boston before a federal court on April 12, 1883, in a trial where Heywood appeared in his own defense, delivering a speech which lasted four and a half hours. Finally declared not guilty by the jury, the verdict was received with obvious pleasure by a considerable gathering of sympathetic onlookers.71

Conviction for such publishing activities as these confirmed Heywood in his decision to continue printing the literature of the free love element, and in 1879 he changed the policy of The Word to conform with his advanced views of the marital and sexual question. Anti-statist views also continued to find extended expression,72 but, like Stephen Pearl Andrews, he became engrossed with the possibilities of a union of all the various fragments of the intellectual radical movement. With the aid of Andrews, he attempted to bring these together in a Union Reform League, with headquarters in Princeton, but at the end of three years, the major part of the interest in such a project had waned. The ’80’s saw the initiative in the spreading of anarchism pass into the hands of Benjamin Tucker and his associates, who for a time confined their attentions to predominantly economic questions.

For a brief period, in 1889, Heywood re-entered the arena, stimulated by the widespread campaign for local option on the part of temperance groups in Massachusetts, following the passage of a local option law in Ohio in 1888.73 The drive for the prohibition of the sale and traffic of liquor by law, accompanied by a parallel proposition to control the sale of alcoholic beverages by state license, provoked the appearance of the vigorous counter-attack Social Ethics, wherein Heywood arraigned the crusade to legislate the virtue of temperance.

He protested that whether an individual partook of alcohol or abstained was strictly an affair of his own. Philosophically, morally, or politically, the drive to promote sobriety was baseless, in the eyes of the believer in natural society, where personal freedom was unrestrained except when it approached the area where it infringed on the similarity of freedom possessed by another.74 Blanket statutory prohibition constituted a serious invasion of individual personality; and, said Heywood, “individuals are the primary and ultimate facts in this wilderness of pronoun which is called society.”75 Total prohibition or state-licensed sale were sides of the same coin; one despaired of liberty and the other of temperance, “two distrusts of the ability of men and women to work out their own salvation.”76

Prohibition he considered irrational sumptuary legislation which contributed nothing to bridging the moral gap, while licensing in the hope of producing temperance by destroying the “grog shop” approached the problem from the reverse side of truth, since the habit of intemperance preceded the dispensary, and not vice versa.77 The drive to license the sale in salutary surroundings was “a raid on the poor man’s hotel,” the saloon, and highly suspicious:78

. . . the hypocritical manifesto of the politico-ecclesiastical rogues trying to sail between rum and water into office. If it is right to sell rum at all, it is the right of poor men and women to sell it. License is wrong because . . . civil power ought not to sanction evil manifest in ill-use of liquor; . . . because it accepts intemperance as a fixed permanent fact, instead of working to abolish it; . . . because it enacts monopoly . . . and enshrines vicious practices in attractive, respectable, insidious environment.

When Heywood was convicted for postal law violations in 1878, he had suspected that others than his publishing business had precipitated his difficulties, especially his attitudes toward labor and government. When he was again arrested on similar charges, in May, 1890,79 he was convinced that it was a political matter. The new Harrison administration had replaced the Democratic postmaster in Princeton with an enemy of Heywood’s, Josiah D. Gregory, whom the former referred to as a “high-toned, prohibitory, anti-saloon Republican,”80 a man unsympathetic with any radical sentiment. At his direction, deliveries of The Word had been interrupted.

Heywood was sentenced again to two years in prison in Charlestown, serving the full term. Several petitions to Harrison for pardon were ignored, largely because of malice on the part of his own relatives, Heywood charged.81 One of these petitions, signed by 1400 prominent persons in the United States, England and Scotland, including Elizabeth B. Chase, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Annie Besant, Andrew Jackson Davis, Theoder Dwight Weld, the pioneer abolitionist, and several other well-known persons, indicated the interest the case aroused.82 Efforts to have his paper printed in his absence failed, and for the first time in 18 years, the first sustained voice of anarchist doctrine in America was silenced. Resumed in 1892 upon its editor’s return, it permanently lapsed when he died May 22, 1893, little over a year after returning.

Ezra Heywood is best remembered for his efforts in the propagation of native anti-government thought and literature83 during a period of transition when radicalism was receding almost to the vanishing point before a wave of post-war sentiment for continued conformity. Although not particularly important as an original thinker, his services as a publisher in reprinting the works of Warren and Greene served to keep their ideas current, resulting in the widespread interest in the economics of the free society on the part of a later generation. His own erratic writings were not without influence; some of his floridity, acrid phrasing and talent for articulation was to be found in the work of Tucker at a later time. The revival of the mutual money theories of Greene is particularly noteworthy from the standpoint of anarchist economic thought, in this respect Heywood’s work being an important rediscovery.

2. William B. Greene, Money Reformer

The fundamental structure of American anarchism is without doubt based upon the social and economic experiments and writings of Josiah Warren. In one respect however, his subsequent followers chose to expand the limits of the outline of the free economy. This was in a field in which the New Harmony pioneer had been noticeably inconclusive, finance. The gradual but increasing complexity of the economy, especially the division of labor occurring in both production and distribution, brought the matter of exchange more forcibly to the attention of the anti-statist radicals. This resulted in one of the few real additions to Warrenite mutualism, the idea of the mutual bank of William B. Greene, an ignored contemporary of Warren’s during the period of the experimental towns.

Greene, unlike Warren, did not devote a lifetime to unorthodox activities. His life touched the radical movement with intensity only at intervals, and his conversion to full-fledged anarchist beliefs occupied only the last ten years of his life, despite an intimate acquaintanceship of a full three decades. Furthermore, his early years give no clue as to the source of any of his later interest in political economy and finance. In a similar manner to Ezra Heywood, it was a sequel to an abortive career in the ministry.

Born in Haverhill, Massachusetts,84 the son of a Boston newspaper publisher, Greene was educated at West Point, and acquired there an affinity with military ways that he never repudiated, despite his early defection. He took part in the Seminole campaign in Florida against Osceola as a young officer, and while on active duty professed to have gone through a sudden conversion to religion, now believing war to be “unjust.” He continued to hold his commission and remain in the fighting area, however, hesitant to expose himself to expected ridicule on announcing his change of heart.85 He returned north following a serious illness after eighteen months of service and entered a theological seminary. Becoming an Unitarian, he now devoted much of his time to the study of Egyptian and Indian history and religion, some of his later writings indicating a competent grasp of oriental philosophy.86 After leaving the Harvard Divinity School, where he had become an associate of Thomas Wentworth Higginson,87 he located in Brookfield, near Worcester, and engaged in the writing of religious tracts and pamphlets.

Few instances in American history have created as much curiosity concerning economic and financial matters among amateurs and members of the general citizenry as the panic of 1837, and the drastic credit stringency which characterized it. Banking abuses came under concentrated scrutiny and gave rise to many proposed radical remedies. William Beck’s plan for inducing the business world to adopt credit and employ it so as to perform the functions of money by utilizing a complicated system which generalized credit in account, was broached in 1839, and was one of the first. Edward Kellogg’s Labor and Other Capital, a direct outgrowth of his personal experiences in the panic, had been completed by July, 1843, although it remained unpublished for several years and did not receive much attention until post-Civil War times.88 Other plans, involving considerable originality and inspired by a fear of the potentialities of a money system based on an alliance between large bankers and politicians, sought to impress the independent-minded with the possibilities of solution on a local level, by-passing reforms requiring large-scale adoption.

Financial thinking was still dominated by concepts which dated from early eighteenth century times, and concerned the needs of a decentralized economic society. A product of the colonial land bank period, the philosophy centered on a banking system based on private credit. This situation may have been aided by the comparative lack of a commercial class in the vast non-urban areas, the group most interested in central banking policies along European models.89

The drive for centralized banking on mercantile credit, well under way by the 1837 panic, was meeting plenty of opposition during the same period, since it hardly coincided with majority opinion well down to the Civil War. Many expert critics, among them Richard Hildreth, William M. Gouge and George Tucker, had promoted the idea of competition in banking, attacked the national bank and condemned state chartered banks in general.90

Free banking in the sense in which it was understood during this period was not synonymous with the unchartered system proposed by early individualist anarchists. Despite many structural similarities and often a similar propaganda the two financial theories proceeded along separate ways. It can readily be seen, however, that the monetary theories of Greene and Lysander Spooner are deeply indebted to the environment of unrest caused by disturbed relations existing in the money system of the United States of their times.

The writings of Greene were to become the best known, although Spooner had previously stated the position of the free money decentralist in Greene’s home area with the publication of his Constitutional Law Relative to Credit, Currency and Banking in Worcester in 1843. Spooner had followed this up with an even more positive work in this line, Poverty, Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure, which appeared in Boston three years later.91 It is doubtful whether Greene had any knowledge of these brief treatises when his own expositions of the philosophy of mutualism in banking began to appear for the first time, in a series of newspaper articles in the Worcester Palladium in 1849 under the pseudonym “Omega.” Gathered together and expanded with unpublished material, the collection was issued, under the title Equality, in West Brookfield that same year. This is essentially the same work brought out under the title Mutual Banking the following year, and was destined to become the most widely reprinted of all anarchist financial publications written by a native American. For an understanding of Greene’s political, economic and social ideas they are best studied together.

A bank, in Greene’s opinion, had only one reason for existing: that of being a place to bring together borrowers and lenders, regardless of what the particular capital available for lending consisted and what was wanted by the borrower. The man without tools and raw material was helpless despite any degree of industry, while the owner of such things faced the prospect of watching them deteriorate in the event that laborers desiring them for productive purposes could not be found. Being what he called “mutually necessary” to each other, their efforts to locate each other was a continual process, which banks could greatly facilitate.92 The bank as he saw it, however, was an anti-social institution, carrying on a war with those citizens who did not happen to be a part of it. Free competition among owners of capital he regarded a healthful thing, depressing the rate of interest and guaranteeing to the worker a greater percentage return of the total of his production. Once a bank in the ordinary sense of the word became organized, this process abruptly ceased. The device thus conceived enabled a number of lenders to escape the consequences of competition, and enabled them to bring “crushing” force upon individuals who did not belong to their number, thus resulting in their possessing the power to control interest rates to their best advantage and prevent the fall of the price of any commodity which they offered to potential lenders.93 Chartered by the legislature, they were now in a perfect position “to enable the few to bring the many under tribute”; “On the side of the bank there is a small army, well equipped, well officered, and well disciplined; on the side of the community, there is a large, undisciplined crowd, without arms, and without leaders.”94

The picture was complete only as far as the particular group of capitalists forming the bank in question was considered; there still existed the possibility of competition from without, with the consequent much-feared drop in the rate of interest. Here the hand of government, which granted them the monopoly of incorporation, stepped in again to preclude the latter possibility with another special privilege.95 But to understand this stage, Greene declared, it was necessary to review the postion of the government in the general matters of the currency and artificially-created rates of interest.

Greene believed that all trade was barter in one form or another. The adoption of specie by society as a circulating medium merely made the process easier rather than destroyed it. It still remained a valuable commodity, subject to purchase and sale like all others; “. . . when we sell anything for money, we buy the money, and . . . when we buy anything with money, we sell the money.”96

With the establishment of specie in the form of gold and silver as the only legal tender by the government and the exclusion of all other types of property from furnishing this function, an altogether new element entered into consideration. Exchange remained the same type of process, but the action of the legislature had enhanced the utility of the precious metals in a “remarkable manner.” The exchangeable value of a particular commodity depended upon not only its utility but the relative scarcity of it as well. The relative scarcity of gold and silver gave them now a new value not inherent in them as metals, but an artificial one conferred on them by the action of the government, presumably in the interests of society.97 The result? Greene said that now the metals became a marketable commodity as a medium of exchange, and their utility as a means of exchange became abruptly contracted, allowing those who managed to obtain a monopoly of the supply of these metals to similarly control the business of the area using them as the sole legal tender, and thereby secure a premium for their use by all others engaging in commerce.98 “Hence follow great social and political evils,” commented Greene. One of the major attempts to repair the damage done to the commercial structure was the passage by the government of laws arbitrarily limiting the rate of interest. This did nothing to restore any kind of competition among loaners of capital, however, because of still another government-created factor, the allowing of holders of specie, incorporated as banks, to issue paper money up to twice the face value of the specie.99 This enable them to gether twice the rate of interest permitted, or to drive all non-banker loaners of capital out by charging one-half the interest until the latter ceased competing. Thus even “usury” laws100 were negated by the creation of banks. The process now went along relatively unhindered, Greene observed:101

Now the banks have everything in their hands. They make great issues, and money becomes plenty; . . . all other commodities become dear. Then the capitalist sells what he has to sell, while prices are high. The banks draw in their issues, and money becomes scarce, . . . all other commodities become cheap. The community becomes distressed for money, individuals are forced to sell property to raise money—and to sell at a loss on account of the state of the market: then the capitalist buys what he desires to buy, while everything is cheap. . . . The operation of the banking system is evident; . . .

He commented briefly on the impact that banking and credit organization was producing upon production and price levels. The corollary to credit monopoly, he noted, was an accompanying belief that price was determined by the amount of labor that different commodities could command, which he designated “the philosophy of speculation on human misfortune.” “Considered from this point of view,” Greene pointed out, “the price of commodities is regulated, not by the labor expended in their production, but by the distress and want of the laboring class.” A vigorous proponent of the labor cost theory of value, as was Warren, he pronounced: ‘There is no device of the political economists so infernal as the one which ranks labor as a commodity, varying in value according to supply and demand.”102 Greene stoutly held that the ratio of the supply of labor to the demand for it was unvarying because every producer was a consumer “to the precise extent of the amount of his products,” and the price of labor ought therefore to be constant.

Greene admitted that there was not only a market price for commodities, which he believed to be based on supply and demand, but a “natural” price, as well, which depended on its cost of production. Although these were in a state of continual oscillation due to the credit system, under a proper system they would coincide at all times.103 The phenomena of want and “overproduction” were directly attributable to the credit structure. “Many a tailor has carried his coat to a market where coats were at once voted over production, not because there was no real demand for coats, but because there was no money demand for them.”104 Credit as he saw it in operation was actually perpetuating feudalism. Money was furnished to individuals and corporations principally for purposes of speculation, advantageous to the speculators if successful, catastrophic to the community if a failure. Monopoly of trade or insecurity were the alternatives of “the existing organization of credit. . . the daughter of hard money, begotten upon it incestuously by that insufficiency of circulating medium which results from laws making specie the sole legal tender.”105

Greene’s proposition for remedying the cyclical money shortage and the artificial control of the economy vested in the banking fraternity by the government was the “mutual bank.” Any person could become a member of this bank by pledging mortgages to the bank on actual property, upon which he would be issued bills of exchange amounting to one-half of the total value of the mortgaged property.106 No money was to be loaned to persons not members of the particular banking company, all members entering into a voluntary agreement to accept the paper of the bank in all payments, at par, when presented by fellow members. The rate of interest at which the money was to be loaned to the members was to be sufficient only to pay the operating expenses of the institution. Greene claimed that one per cent would be enough. Other principles of the mutual bank provided for the release of the member from his pledge when his mortgage had been redeemed, and a declaration promising perpetual non-redemption in specie of the bills of the bank.

What the Greene proposal amounted to was a mutual agreement on the part of a number of persons to monetize other values than specie to the amount of one-half of the declared valuation of a given volume of these other values, preferably real property. However, he once said, “. . . anything that may be sold under the hammer may be made a basis for the issue of mutual money.”107 At the time he originally proposed such a bank, he suggested that the undertaking be postponed until 10,000 persons signified their intentions of starting the organization. This he thought would insure the feeling of security on the part of the members, because all might inspect the books and thus observe on what basis all others were having money issued. This would be further strengthened by the psychological effect of 10,000 persons in the vicinity of such a bank, all using the bills in the member stores, hotels, theatres, tailor shops, restaurants and similar business enterprises, in payment for desired goods and services.108

Currency in sufficient volume to satisfy the need thereof was Greene’s objective, which necessitated a complete divorce from the specie idea of redemption. However, he found no fault with having the valuation of the monetized property expressed with the silver dollar as the standard of value in mind, and the measure of value as well. Thus tied to the silver dollar, the mutual bank bills would rise and fall with the value of silver dollars, without fear of depreciation. Based on the dollar as the measure of value, the silver at a designated degree of fineness and weight as the standard of value, the mutual money was to serve only as an instrument of exchange.109 Greene considered that such money would escape the evil consequences attending scarcity or excess of supply. It would always be worth its face value in silver dollars. Like Proudhon, he believed that the element of money which rendered it insecure was the doubt of final redemption in specie, and he proposed to eliminate this by generalizing the bill of exchange:110

. . . that is to say, in making of it an anonymous title, exchangeable forever, and redeemable at sight, but only in merchandise and services. Or, to speak a language more comprehensible to financial adepts, the problem consists in basing bank paper . . . upon products.

The mutual bank was a “producer’s bank,” said Greene. Its currency was non-interest-bearing. The monetization of commodities other than gold and silver would tend to further depress the rate of interest. This would enable a person with only his labor to offer to easily borrow capital to engage in productive work and thus create capital goods of his own. Individuals would thus join a mutual bank company not in expectation of a dividend but to facilitate the procurement of money, a lowering rate of interest being substituted for the usual dividend incentive.111

Greene objected to the comparison of the mutual money with the disreputable “wildcat money” of a decade before on four grounds. The wildcat issues not only promised to redeem in specie, but professed to be based on specie which did not exist. By pretending to be gold and silver, they gravely “deranged” the currency. Without specie backing or any other guarantee, the money was principally borrowed by the stockholders of these wildcat banks. Mutual money, on the other hand, was not redeemable in specie, but in actual existing commodities of other types. Furthermore, issued against actual values, it was utilized by all who “insured” it, and had no more effect upon the precious metals than upon any other particular materials or commodities.112

What would be the consequences of decentralized mutual banking upon such a basis as Greene proposed? A frontal attack on the state was his conclusion:113

Mutualism operates, by its very nature, to render political government, founded on arbitrary force, superfluous; that is, it operates to the decentralization of the political power, and to the transformation of the State by substituting self-government instead of government ab extra.

An investigation of American colonial history not only reinforced this conclusion but resulted in his abandonment of any claims to originality as far as the mutual bank idea was concerned. In actuality, Greene’s and Kellogg’s financial propositions had venerable antecedents in the history of eighteenth century Massachusetts, where “land banks”114 remarkably similar to that of Greene had been proposed in 1714 and again in 1740. The earlier bank had never obtained the sanction of the General Court, and died in discussion, while that of 1740 actually operated for a time, with admitted success.115 This latter bank, which received widespread popular support, nevertheless terminated abruptly. It was disallowed by the British Parliament, acting at the request of the governor and others whom Thomas Hutchinson designated as “men of estates and the principal merchants in the province.”116 Hutchinson, no friend of the venture, labeled its originators “persons in difficult or involved circumstances in trade, or such as were possessed of real estates but had little or no ready money at command,” and supported primarily by those “generally of low condition among the plebeians and of small estate.”117

Greene considered it highly significant that Hutchinson admitted the strength of the bank, confessing that “Had not parliament interposed, the province would have been in the utmost confusion, and the authority of government entirely in the land bank company.”118 It was Greene’s interpretation that the principal disturbance created by the bank had been political rather than economic:119

. . . Gov. Hutchinson ought to have explained more in detail the nature of the evils he complains of; and also to have told us why he, a declared enemy of popular institutions, opposed the advocates of the bank so uncompromisingly.

The discovery of a colonial precedent neither detracted from Greene’s enthusiasm for his project nor cast any suspicions upon his independent status as an innovator. With the financial writings of others, however, he was already familiar, particularly Kellogg and Proudhon. It is highly probable that he learned from both,120 even though later editions of his works carried sharp criticisms of some of their theories.121 Favorable quotations of Kellogg in several of his works indicated a thorough reading at one time of Labor and Other Capital.122 His knowledge of Proudhon appears to have been somewhat less thorough until after a stay in France in the late ‘50’s, during which time he became personally acquainted with the internationally-known French anarchist.123 It is most inaccurate to speak of Greene simply as a proponent of Proudhonian principles.

Coming at a time when the labor and consumer groups were experimenting with “associated workshops” and “protective union stores,” Greene suggested that the mutual bank be incorporated in the movement, forming what he called “complementary units of production, consumption, and exchange, . . . the triple formula of practical mutualism.” This program of mutualism he considered best adapted to local community level. In times of economic distress, the mutual money would prove the bulwark against inflationary or deflationary pressures: “the town cannot fail disastrously, for the real property is always there, rooted in the very ground.”124

For some time the campaign ran strongly to obtain a charter from the Massachusetts General Court for the establishment of a mutual bank. Greene, now in Boston, argued the case before the Town and Country Club of which he was a member, along with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Henry James, the elder, W. H. Channing, Octavius B. Frothingham, William D. Ticknor, Charles Sumner, E. R. Hoar, Henry Giles, John Orvis, and George B. Loring. Repeated petitions to the General Court were made in 1850-51 both under his sponsorship and that of groups of inhabitants of Brookfield, Ware and Warren.125 In 1857 he restated his financial arguments in a volume titled The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, and the Advantages of a Mutual Currency, under the stimulation of the new panic assailing the nation’s economy. Apathy was the principal response. Shortly thereafter Greene left for France, where he became interested for a time in mathematics,126 concern over social matters abating until after the war.

Greene’s Equality contained other than his money and banking theories. Some of his sociological ideas, albeit evidencing little logical organization and often contradictory, appeared here and there in its pages. One was his assertion that as an individual, a man received certain rights at creation, but that the right of property was not one of them. This was a social creation, and was not absolute. “Society gives me . . . proprietorship . . . because it is for its own interests to do so; my right to my watch is not a natural, but a social right. I own it, not because I earned it, . . . but by the free grace and favor of society.”127 Greene’s conception of individualism, however, was religious in nature. Although failing to describe the rights which the individual received from God, he condemned coercion of any kind as a contention against God Himself. It was therefore “profoundly immoral” to make a man dependent upon his neighbors or upon public opinion, which made him “subservient to his accidents, instead of supreme over them.”128

In another respect he was much less indefinite. Equality contained one of the first of the anarchist arraignments of socialism as a system of societal organization. Socialism, averred Greene, was the only political system in which he could see no “good points.” In other types he saw a few privileged groups such as nobles, slaveholders, or “usurers” who managed to gather some advantages as compared to the volume of evil endured by “the mass of the people,” but no one appeared to gain under socialism:129

In socialism, there is but one master, which is the state; but the state is not a living person, capable of suffering and happiness. Socialism benefits none but demagogues, and is, emphatically, the organization of universal misery . . . socialism gives us but one class, a class of slaves.

Written at a time when proponents of “state” socialism had hardly begun to state the theory, Greene’s blast presaged the ideological conflict which was to break out in full flower in the anarchist and socialist journals of thirty-five years later.

Greene’s career after his advocacy of the mutual bank was as much an account of irreconcilables as that which had previously transpired. Although abhorring government beyond the local level, he joined the Democratic party. At the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1853 he championed minority representation and woman suffrage. He was also an outspoken abolitionist.130 Wealthy by inheritance and marriage, he returned from his stay in France at the outbreak of the Civil War, and became commander of the 14th Massachusetts Regiment, later resigning after a quarrel with Governor Andrew.131

Activity in the ranks of the intellectual radicals once more absorbed his interest at the end of the war. He restated most of his social philosophy in a small book titled Sovereignty of the People, at about the time Heywood’s Worcester group began to demonstrate interest in the mutual bank literature. The reprinting of an enlarged edition of Mutual Banking, the formation of the Labor Reform Leagues, and Heywood’s publication of The Word all found in Greene a ready supporter and participant. In the latter part of 1872 he became a member of the French Section of the Marxian International Working People’s Association in Boston. Shortly afterward he became president of the New England Labor Reform League.132 This affiliation placed the N. E. L. R. L. as a whole under suspicion as a branch of the International. The aims of the former were alleged to be a mere restatement of those of “the foreign communists.”133 Although he collaborated with French members in the formulation of an address outlining the principles of the International Working People’s Association, which was subsequently read before the N. E. L. R. L. at the 1873 convention,134 it appears that neither he nor the League continued relations. This is borne out by Greene’s critical writings concerning communism and his first translations of Proudhon’s writings.135

Between 1872-1876 Heywood and the League made several attempts to obtain a charter for a mutual bank from the Massachusetts General Court, but to no avail. The earliest of these was buried in the Committee on Banks and Banking, three of whose seven members were bankers themselves. The general treatment received strengthened the convictions of prominent members of the League that “legislatures are made up of capitalists who draw pay for serving their own interests, not the people’s.” Greene participated in general criticism of the legislature but gave no evidence of entertaining hope that opposition might be overcome.136

Greene returned to Europe in the spring of 1878. His premature death in Weston, England137 during this same year brought to an end the career of the ablest native American anarchist writer and theorist on finance. Mutual Banking remained prominent in the individualist propaganda thereafter without additions or abridgement. It was widely read by those interested in radical currency, and has been reprinted repeatedly up to the present day.138

The contributions of Ezra Heywood and William B. Greene to native anarchist thought are important not only in themselves but also in their impact upon contemporaries and later converts. Ineffectual upon the radical movement as a whole due to their unconcern with class consciousness, they were regarded as mere examples of the petty bourgeois response to the grave and growing economic disarrangements of their time. Their importance in the transition period between the experimental colonies and the strictly intellectual propaganda of anti-statism cannot be ignored, for by 1890 their efforts had become recognized among radicals everywhere as a contribution to revolutionary social philosophy. Greene’s currency ideas gradually became those which the latter-day anarchists supported, even though they represented a change from those originally developed by Warren. The “labor for labor” ideas embodied in the labor check system, found in the writings of both Warren and Andrews, dropped from the discussions of the problems of exchange. Mutual banking and currency based on a commodity standard of value, but allowing for the monetization of all durable wealth, now became the core of anti-statist finance. In like manner Warren’s approach to the land problem was modified by the inclusion of more studied and abstract thinking by less radical exponents of reform.

 

___________

139.  Boston Globe, May 23, 1893. Heywood’s birthplace has generally been located at Princeton, Mass., until recent data received from a daughter verified other conclusions. See Ceres Haywood Bradshaw to Agnes Inglis, November 15, 1947, in Labadie Collection. A short biographical sketch stressing Heywood’s position in the early civil liberties fight written by Zechariah Chafee, Jr., is in Dictionary of American Biography, VIII, 609610.

140.  See Heywood’s letter of November 29, 1877 to The Index, VIII, 573; Alfred E. Giles to Benjamin R. Tucker, July 25, 1878, in Tucker, (ed.), Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting Held in Faneuil Hall, Thursday Evening, August 1, 1878, to Protest Against the Injury Done to the Freedom of the Press by the Conviction and Imprisonment of Ezra H. Heywood, 56.

141.  Heywood was a student at Brown from September, 1852 until February, 1858. He first became acquainted with Garrison and The Liberator through a boarding house associate and friend of Garrison’s wife. Lucifer, IX (May 20, 1892), 3. For his anti-war stand in 1863, se Curti, Peace or War, 76-77.

142.  The Word, XVII (January, 1889), 2.

143.  See the account by Heywood in William B. Greene, Mutual Banking, (1870 ed.), preface, iii.

144.  Heywood was one of the 83 delegates present. Land and money reformers predominated at this meeting. Commons, Documentary History, IX, 197; Charlotte Todes, William H. Sylvis and the National Labor Union (New York, 1942), 99-100.

145.  See however, Heywood’s letter in the Workingman’s Advocate, June 20, 1868, on the suspended publication of labor papers, including the Boston Voice and the New York National Workman.

146.  This was written in 1868 and published in New York, and was probably his first work on money and labor reform.

147.  Heywood, The Labor Party, 1.

148.  Labor Party, 5.

149.  Labor Party, 14.

150.  Labor Party, 5-6.

151.  At one point he queried, “Universal suffrage is urged as a cure; but workingmen have voted in Massachusetts for two hundred years, and where are they now? . . . Right was before governments, and will survive them”; yet a short while later he proposed the following, “In order, therefore, to lay the axe at the root of the difficulty, we accept the opportune suggestion of the Labor Congress, at Chicago, and prepare for political action. The sooner we put good sense into the ballot box, the sooner good government will come out of it.” Labor Party, 9, 13.

152.  Labor Party, 6, 9, 15, 17.

153.  Labor Party, 16. Heywood remarked at this time that “Wall Street is the next Richmond to be captured.”

154.  See article 2 in Heywood (ed.), Declaration of Sentiments and Constitution of the New England Labor Reform League, 8.

155.  Declaration, 6.

156.  By this was meant common opportunity of occupation or acquisition for ownership and use through one’s lifetime, and not communal exploitation in the sense of the socialist or communitarian belief. Declaration, 3.

157.  This was in keeping with anarchist doctrines of early standing which denied the validity, in estimating price, of any element other than the relative amount of time spent in production.

158.  Declaration, 4.

159.  Declaration, 4-5.

160.  For the use of the labor note currency at the Irish economic experiment in coöperation at Ralahine, see Pare, Co-öperative Agriculture, 63-67.

161.  Heywood, Yours Or Mine; An Essay to Show the True Basis of Property and the Causes of Its Inequitable Distribution, 3.

162.  Of the anarchists, Heywood was without doubt the most widely read in the works of the writers in the field of economics. His own productions indicated from time to time by quotations that he was familiar with Adam Smith, Ricardo, Ruskin, Hobbes, N. W. Senior, Bentham, Bastiat, J. S. Mill, De Quincey, Bouvier, Amasa Walker and Proudhon, as well as his individualist anarchist contemporaries, Greene, Spooner and Warren.

163.  Yours Or Mine, 13.

164.  “Since legal sanction makes stealing popular, respectable, and possible, the great anti-theft movement known as Labor Reform involves the abolition of the State.” Yours Or Mine, 23.

165.  Yours Or Mine, 4-6, 8. Although this approach has generally been ignored or ridiculed by conventional economics, Henry George admitted that there was some worth to the contention that a recompense was due for such service rendered, rather than interest extracted. However, this was to him just one aspect of the phenomenon of interest, as “the reproductive forces of nature” was the real source of interest in its proper sense. George, Progress and Poverty, (15th ed.), 176, 188.

166.  Yours Or Mine, 14. He accused the bankers, as did Greene, of manipulating the currency, buying when its value was deflated and selling when inflated, precipitating crises by conscious action.

167.  Yours Or Mine, 14.

168.  Yours Or Mine, 9. It was characteristic for Heywood, when writing on the matter of interest, to quote fragments from the Bible, usually Moses and Christ, as well as from such diverse personalities as Cato, St. Basil, Buxton and Roger Bacon, which inveighed against the taking of interest.

169.  Yours Or Mine, 15.

170.  For a summary of these works, see Chapter VII, Part II.

171.  Heywood, Hard Cash, 6, 14, 18, 23.

172.  Hard Cash, 11. Concerning the matter of unions, he had stated the previous year; “Since the privilege of association is a fundamental necessity of free institutions, no one can disprove the right or duty of workers to form unions for their own protection; but they should not waste their strength in abortive expedients.” Yours Or Mine, 18-19.

173.  Hard Cash, 14.

174.  “. . . a state currency, in a worse sense than a state church, a state school or a state newspaper press, is an imposition of the most fraudulent and oppressive nature . . . the attempt of government to issue currency on the imaginary basis of the “public faith” is a stately species of forgery, . . .” Hard Cash, 12-13.

175.  Hard Cash, 21. On the decline of the National Labor Union, see Jonathan Grossman, William Sylvis, Pioneer of American Labor (New York, 1945), 267-268.

176.  The occasion for the breakup with the Anthony group was the backing by the suffragette organization of U. S. Grant, “that great criminal,” as a presidential candidate. The rejection of a labor exchange plan in favor of coöperatives, which later Heywood spurned as “the life-boat of small thieves,” provoked the split with the N. L. U. See The Word, I (September, 1872), 2.

177.  Heywood was the principal force behind a number of picturesque and in-triguingly named organizations, among which were the American Anti-Usury Society, the Universal Peace Union, the American Spiritualist Association, the Boston Eight Hour League, the American Free Dress League, the New England Anti-Death Society (another spiritualist group), and the New England Free Love League, founded in the winter of 1873 with the help of Tucker and L. K. Joslin, for the principal purpose of getting Victoria Woodhull back to New England on another speaking tour.

178.  The Word, II (June, 1873), 1.

179.  The Word, II (December, 1873), 2.

180.  The Word, I (June, 1872), 1.

181.  The Word, III (May, 1874), 2; The Word, IV (May, 1875), 2.

182.  The Word, I (May, 1872), 1. The four page broadsheet sold for five cents a copy; an annual subscription cost 50 cents.

183.  The Word, V (April, 1877), 2. In this issue Heywood claimed to have been the first to suggest the term “labor reform.”

184.  The Word, I (May, 1872), 3.

185.  The Word, I (June, 1872), 2. Keyser, an associate of Thomas Devyr and other leaders of the land reform movement, had been at one time secretary of the New York Land Reform Association. The Spirit of the Age, I (December 29, 1849), 410.

186.  The Word, II (August, 1873), 2.

187.  Heywood, Uncivil Liberty: An Essay to Show the Injustice and Impolicy of Ruling Woman Without Her Consent, 4-7, 9-10, 20; The Word, I (Au-gust, 1872), 2.

188.  Warren was a supporter of both the Massachusetts Labor Union and the eight hour movement, and broke with the New England Labor Reform League after it adopted Heywood’s resolutions at the 1872 convention opposing both. The Word, I (August, 1872), 1; The Word, I (September, 1872), 1, 3.

189.  Warren was already in Boston, engaged in writing a series of articles for the Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly in 1873, on his experiences with Robert Owen. Under the title “Communism: the Way It Worked and What It Led to,” several had already appeared when the Beecher-Tilton case became a national scandal via Mrs. Woodhull’s paper, and provoked Warren’s rebuke for mixing the labor reform and marriage questions.

190.  The Word, I (April, 1873), 2; Warren, Letter to E. H. Heywood, 2. See also Heywood’s communications to The Index, V, 153; VII, 536.

191.  Warren, Letter to Heywood, 3-4; The Word, I (June, 1872), 3; The Word, II (July, 1873), 4.

192.  Warren, Letter to Heywood, 2; The Word, II (May, 1873), 2.

193.  The Word, I (July, 1872), 3.

194.  Warren, Letter to Heywood, 1-2.

195.  Greene as well as Warren was not pleased over the attention being given to the campaign for sexual freedom in Heywood’s paper. In a communication to Heywood he spoke of it as “this free-love muddle.” The Word, III (August, 1874), 4.

196.  The Word, III (July, 1874), 2.

197   “Fourier’s complete surrender of labor to speculative capital forbids me to even hope that he can safely be taken as a guide in social reform.” The Word, V (September, 1876), 3.

198.  The Word, IV (March, 1876), 2; The Word, VI (June, 1877), 2.

199.  The Word, VII (December, 1878), 2.

200.  The Proudhonian apothegm “Property is robbery” Spencer interpreted literally, ignoring the former’s definition of “property.” Gladden accepted Spencer’s interpretation that anarchism meant to right material wrongs by violence. The Word, V (November, 1876), 2; Washington Gladden, Working People and Their Employers (Boston, 1876), 199-200.

201.  Heywood, The Great Strike: Its Relations to Labor, Property and Government, 15. Heywood was nearer the truth than most of the conservatives. For examples of irregularities in the conduct of the trial and evidence of possible coaching of witnesses by James McParlan, Pinkerton detective hired by President Franklin Gowen of the Reading Railroad, see James W. Coleman, The Molly Maguire Riots (Richmond, 1936), 162, 168-172.

202.  See The Great Strike, 6, 8-9, for indictments of the federal government as having permitted the railroads to grow in strength at the expense of the remainder of the nation.

203.  The Great Strike, 13.

204.  The refusal of militia to obey orders at various times during the strike, especially commands to fire on strikers, Heywood found especially heartening. The Great Strike, 20.

205.  The Great Strike, 3-4, 22-23. Heywood was now of the belief that the dispute between “capital and labor” was “an irrespressible conflict,” a stand inconsistent with an estimation which he had expressed less than ten years before.

206.  Tucker (ed.), Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting . . . August 1, 1878 . . ., 3-4.

207.  Tucker (ed.), Proceedings of the Indignation Meeting . . . August 1, 1878 . . ., 6-9, 12-13, 20, 28-29, 46-48.

208.  Carl Schurz and James A. Garfield were both contacted by the defense, and favored Heywood’s release. See Ezra Heywood to Elizabeth M. F. Denton, August 17, and December 14, 1878; Angela Heywood to Elizabeth M. F. Denton, December 20, 1878, in Heywood MSS., Labadie Collection.

209.  See the short summary in Broun and Leech, Anthony Comstock, 183-184. For the full text of Heywood’s speech see Free Speech: Report of Ezra H. Heywood’s Defense Before the United States Court in Boston, April 10-11 and 12, 1883; Together with Judge Nelson’s Charge to the Jury . . ., 9-43. This interesting booklet, prepared by Heywood for public distribution, contains the verbatim testimony of key witnesses, as well as numerous reprints of press comments which the widely discussed trial provoked.

210.  In April 1881, Heywood said that The Words whole stand could be summed up as the support of “abolition of property in raw materials and the removal of restrictions on association and exchange.” The Word, X (May, 1881), 2.

211.  Peter Odegard, Pressure Politics, the Story of the Anti-Saloon League (New York, 1928),2-3.

212.  Heywood, Social Ethics: An Essay to Show that Since the Right of Private Judgment Must be Respected in Morals as Well as in Religion, Free Rum, the Conceded Right of Choice in Beverages and Required Power to Decline Intoxicants Promotes Rational Sobriety and Assures Temperance, 23.

213.  Social Ethics, 6.

214.  Social Ethics, 3-4.

215.  It was Heywood’s belief that hard drinking and general alcoholic intemperance were habits of the wealthy which the less-favored later adopted. Social Ethics, 11.

216.  Social Ethics, 9.

217.  Boston Herald, May 12, 1890.

218.  In a letter to The Truth Seeker, May 10, 1890, Heywood mentioned this matter, while remarking that from 1877 to 1884 “the church bigots kept me and my family oscillating between prison and the poor house.” For the influence of Republicans in producing anti-Republican sentiment among freethinkers as a result of the prosecutions following sales of Heywood’s Cupid’s Yokes, see Sidney Warren, American Freethought, 1860-1914 (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, No. 504) (New York, 1943), 196-197.

219.  Ezra Heywood to Elizabeth M. F. Denton, April 18, 1892. See also the letter written in jail by Heywood which explained part of this stand in The Free Thinkers’ Magazine, X (March, 1892), 180-181.

220.  National Defense Association, United States vs. Heywood. Why the Defendant Should Be Released, 1, 17-18, 20-21.

221.  See also article in Lucifer, VIII (November 7, 1890), 3, for an evaluation of Heywood as a pioneer in the propagation of rational sex education among children.

222.  His father was Nathaniel Greene, founder of the Boston Statesman. The Word, VII (July, 1878), 2. Short biographical sketches can be found in James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, (eds.), AppLeton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography, II, 754, and The National Cyclopedia of American Biography, VII, 526.

223.  Greene, The Incarnation. A Letter to Rev. John Fiske, D. D., 27-29, 30-34.

224.  Liberty, IX (December 24, 1892), 1. See also the following works by Greene; Remarks in Refutation of the Treatise of Jonathan Edwards (West Brookfield, Mass., 1848); Transcendentalism (Boston, 1871); The Blazing Star (Boston, 1872).

225.  Higginson remembered him as being “strikingly handsome and mercilessly opinionated.” Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays, 106-107. Another reminiscence by Higginson on Greene and his background in the Boston magazine Brains was reprinted in Liberty, VIII (January 16, 1892), 3.

226.  Kellogg, Labor and Other Capital, (1833 ed.), preface, xv. For the latter period see Chester MacA. Destler, The Influence of Edward Kellogg Upon American Radicalism, 1865-1896 (Chicago, 1932).

227.  Fritz Redlich, “Mercantilist Thought and Early American Banking,” in Essays in American Economic History: Eric Bollman and Studies in Banking (New York, 1944), 107-130; Bray Hammond, “Historical Introduction,” in Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Banking Studies (Washington, 1941), 5-36.

228.  See especially Richard Hildreth, The History of Banks: To Which Is Added, A Demonstration of the Advantages and Necessity of Free Competition in the Business of Banking (Boston, 1837), 131-142; William M. Gouge, A Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States (Philadelphia, 1833); George Tucker, Theory of Money and Banks Investigated (Boston, 1839). For a full treatment of this matter consult Harry E. Miller, Banking Theories in the United States Before 1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1927); Michael J. L. O’Connor, Origins of Academic Economics in the United States (New York, 1944).

229.  A summary of these financial treatises can be found in Chapter VII, Part I.

230.  Greene, Equality, 3.

231.  Commented Greene: “If operatives combine with each other, because they find competition bears too strongly upon them, and strike for higher wages, they may render themselves legally liable to severe punishment; but if capitalists combine to prevent a fall in the price of the commodity they have to offer in the market, the legislature applauds their action, and grants them a charter to enable them to accomplish their purpose more easily and effectually.” Equality, 4.

232.  Equality, 12.

233.  Equality, 7-8.

234.  Equality, 33-34.

235.  “By adopting the precious metals as the legal tender in the payment of debts, society confers a new value upon them, by the action of society. . . . This new value has no natural measure, because it is not a natural but a social value.” Equality, 35-36.

236.  “The monopolizers of the precious metals have an undue power over the community; they can say whether money shall or shall not be permitted to exercise its legitimate functions. . . . The great natural difficulty which originally stood in the way of exchange is now the private property of a class; and this class cultivates this difficulty and makes money out of it.” Equality, 37-38.

237.  Greene was vague as to the credit operations of the banks of his time; banks of a century after his observations, under the Federal Reserve System, are known to lend as much as six times the total of their actual deposits.

238.  Greene used the term “usury” to mean interest in any form, which he considered the means whereby people were enabled to live without working. Equality, 14, 17, 28-30.

239.  Equality, 13.

240.  Greene, Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 3 6.

241.  Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 35.

242.  Greene, Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 56. Emphasis is Greene’s.

243.  Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 51.

244.  Originally the plan had provided for issuance of currency equal to three-fourths of the mortgaged valuation, but through a twenty year period was gradually set at one-half to provide for such contingencies as depreciation of the property mortgaged as well as the possibility of failure to sell at auction for the desired amount in case of default by bank member. Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 24-25; Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 29.

245.  Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 29.

246.  Equality, 47-49.

247.  Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 40, 51-52; Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 34-35.

248.  Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 19. Emphasis is Greene’s.

249.  Equality, 49-50; Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 38, 41; Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 50.

250.  Equality, 49-50. Although mutual money was in the final analysis redeemable if a member of the bank defaulted, it was thought that foreclosures would be very infrequent, and losses of property to holders of the bills issued against it would not occur in any noticeable volume.

251.  Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 41.

252.  The standard treatment of this subject is that of Andrew McFarland Davis, Currency and Banking in the Province of the Massachusetts Bay (2 vols. New York, 1901). The project had been broached before by a Boston merchant, John Colman, who outlined the land bank proposition in a pamphlet, in circulation since 1684, titled The Distressed State of the Town of Boston and Humbly Proposed Methods for Redress. Albert Bushnell Hart (ed.), Commonwealth History of Massachusetts (5 vols. New York, 1928), II, 208.

253.  The influence of the closing of the land bank in creating colonial unrest has generally been neglected by historians. It was the opinion of John Adams that “the act to destroy the Land Bank Scheme raised a greater ferment in this province than the stamp-act did.” Novanglus and Massachusettensis: or Political Essays . . . by John Adams . . . (and) Jonathan Sewall . . . (Boston, 1819), 39. See also Davis, Currency and Banking, II, chapter XII. It should be remembered that the term “land bank” was used in a much different connotation than it is today. This was a banking company which issued its own notes, rather than a mortgage bank or insurance company granting loans on farms or land, as is especially observed in portions of the cotton-growing South, in particular.

254.  Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (3 vols., Boston, 1767), II, 394-396.

255.  Hutchinson, History, II, 207, 393.

256.  Hutchinson, History, II, 396.

257.  Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 41. It was Greene’s contention that the bank was a success, in that the members of the banking company and not the bill holders lost when they were forced to close abruptly.

258.  Compare the Mutual Bank and the Kellogg National Fund especially on the basis of security of notes and issuance, and real property backing. Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 29-37; Kellogg, Labor and Other Capital (1849 ed.), 248-271.

259.  As early as 1850, Greene was criticizing Proudhon’s Banque du Peuple for its potentialities for more highly integrating rather than decentralizing the currency. Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 23-24.

260.  In the 1857 edition of his work on banking, Greene bitterly disputed Kellogg’s claim that the value of money depended on its power of accumulation through interest-bearing. Greene denounced interest-bearing currency as a creature of the “legislature,” which would disappear when the mutual bank monetized all commodities and undermined the position of the scarcer specie legal tender. It was in this edition also that Greene made known his acquaintance with the colonial Land Bank. For the controversy with Kellogg see Greene, The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, and the Advantages of a Mutual Currency, 203-205; The Word, III (September, 1874), 4.

For references to Kellogg’s critical observations in a generally approving tone in Greene’s financial writings, consult Equality, 27; Mutual Banking (1870 ed.), 15-16; Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments, 129-130.

261.  Greene thought very highly of Proudhon, although critical of some character traits; “He was too fond of vainglorious distinction and notoriety, and his amiability . . . led him too often, notwithstanding the violence of his writings, to listen favorably to proposals of compromise for the sake of peace and friendship.” The Word, II (April, 1874), 4.

262.  Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 3 6-38.

263.  Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 27-28; Radical Deficiency, introduction, vii, xi, xix; Higginson, Yesterdays, 175-176; The Word, XVIII (December, 1889), 2; Spirit of the Age, II, 51-52, 61, 69-71.

264.  See his published works on the subject; An Expository Sketch of a New Theory of Calculus (Paris, 1859); Explanation of the Theory of Calculus (Boston, 1870).

265.  Equality, 55-56.

266.  Equality, 73. Greene used the word “accident” in a way which might be applied to circumstances, environment, or to both.

267.  Equality, 70-71.

268.  Greene introduced over 30 separate petitions signed by several thousand women requesting permission to vote on the amendments and alterations to the state constitution. Consult appendices in Official Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the State Convention, Assembled May 4th, 1853, to Revise and Amend the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (3 vols. Boston, 1853); Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Begun and Held in Boston on the Fourth Day of May, 1853 (Boston, 1853).

269.  Higginson is responsible for the account describing Greene’s resignation from the Union Army as the result of a political quarrel. Conflicting stories are found in other sources. See Record of the Massachusetts Volunteers, 18611865 (2 vols. Boston, 1868), I, 470; James L. Bowen, Massachusetts in the War 1861-1865 (Springfield, Mass., 1889), 250, 724; Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines in the Civil War (7 vols. Norwood, Mass., 1932), V, 554-556.

270.  Greene reprinted a translation of Proudhon’s famous essay, The State, from the Voix du Peuple of December 3, 1849, in which the latter first used the term “anarchy” as a synonym for the stateless society, in The Word, I (August, 1872), 2.

271.  The Word, IV (March, 1876), 3.

272.  Fragments, 227. See pp. 237-261 in same work for a verbatim account of the address delivered before the N. E. L. R. L.

273.  His translation of Proudhon’s What Is Property? began appearing in The Word in January, 1874, at which time he declared, “You will perceive that Proudhon and our friend Josiah Warren smite on substantially the same anvil.” Warren abruptly repudiated the comparison. The Word, II (January, 1874), 4; The Word, II (March, 1874), 2. It would appear that Warren was aware of Proudhon two decades before this. In the first number of the Periodical Letter, I (July, 1854), 22, Warren wrote the following: “It has been said by ‘Reformers’ that ‘all property was robbery’ but this idea followed out would give every one as much claim upon the products of labor as the producer himself had—of course this would constitute universal robbery and world wide confusion.” It would appear from the context that Warren was referring to Proudhon’s Qu’est ce que la Propriete? but it is unlikely that he had read this work, and would have to be charged with misunderstanding Proudhon’s position.

274.  The most famous of these petitions, that of April 6, 1873, signed by John Orvis, William B. Wright, Greene, Heywood and Tucker, is reprinted in Fragments, appendix. See also The Word, II (May, 1873), 2.

275.  See obituary in The Word, VII (July, 1878), 2.

276.  The most recent edition is that of the Modern Publishers of Indore, India, under the auspices of the Indian Sociological Review, in 1946.

• 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.
• 2It 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.
• 3The 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.
• 4Since 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.
• 5Although 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.
• 6Although 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.
• 7The 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.
• 8In 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.
• 9The 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.)
• 10The 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.)
• 11The 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.
• 12The 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.
• 13The 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.
• 14.  George Warren, “Josiah Warren,” 1. This brief biographical reminiscence of Warren by his only son is an unpublished manuscript written in Evansville, Indiana in 1893, apparently at the request of Lockwood, who was engaged in preparing his study of the New Harmony communities. See Warren MSS., Workingmen’s Institute, George B. Lockwood to George W. Warren, November 10, 1893. Many of the early dates mentioned in this manuscript have proven inaccurate.
• 15.  George Warren, “Josiah Warren,” above. This lamp was patented February 28, 1821, but Warren paid little attention to this matter after becoming part of the New Harmony community. Dictionary of American Biography, XIX, 483. See also note 80, below.
• 16.  The standard work on Owen’s life is Frank Podmore, Robert Owen, A Biography (2 vols. London, 1906). Other works of value are William L. Sargant, Robert Owen, and His Social Philosophy (London, 1860); Lloyd Jones, The Life, Times, and Labours of Robert Owen (2 vols. London, 1890); G. D. H. Cole, The Life of Robert Owen (London, 1930). Owen’s autobiography, The Life of Robert Owen by Himself (New York edition, 1920), is a valuable source.
• 17.  A brief, concise statement of Owen’s stand on this matter may be found in George Milton Janes, Who Should Have Wealth and Other Papers (Milwaukee, 1925), 48. Owen’s “Five Fundamental Facts of Human Nature” are reproduced by Podmore, Robert Owen, 481-482. Page citations are from the one volume edition (New York, 1910).
• 18.  Owen was born at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, Wales, on May 14, 1771. He purchased and began operating the mills at New Lanark in 1798. See the brief, approved biographical sketch in his periodical The New Moral World (London and Leeds, 1834-1845), I (November 1, 1834), 7. This publication was a continuation of The Crisis (London, 1832-1834), which is an extremely important source for the origin and early operations of the renowned Labor Exchanges. Other indispensable periodicals for material concerning Owen are Robert Owen’s Journal (London, 1850-1852), and Robert Owen’s Millennial Gazette (London, 1856-1858). The biography by Podmore contains the most adequate bibliography of Owen’s works, among the standard treatments, which may be supplemented by National Library of Wales, A Bibliography of Robert Owen, the Socialist 1771-1858 (Aberystwyth, Wales, 1914).
• 19.  A brief account stressing the accomplishments of the Rappites at New Harmony is Jacob Schneck and Richard Owen, The History of New Harmony, Ind. (Evansville, Ind., 1890). See also Lockwood, New Harmony Movement, 19-57; John S. Duss, George Rapp and His Associates (Indianapolis, 1914), an account by a specialist in Rappite history.
• 20.  Podmore, Robert Owen, 288; Lockwood, New Harmony Movement, 75; Robert Dale Owen, Threading My Way. Twenty-Seven Years of Autobiography (New York, 1874), 211. Owen claimed that the purchase price was $140,000. The New Harmony Gazette, II (August 15, 1827), 353.
• 21.  Owen’s brief stopover in Cincinnati on his way to New Harmony on December 9, 1824 did not include a speaking engagement there, according to his son William, who was with him on this journey. Joel W. Hiatt, ed., “Diary of William Owen from November 10, 1824, to April 20, 1825,” in Indiana Historical Society Publications, IV, 61. Owen left New Harmony January 7, 1825, and spoke in Cincinnati on his way to Washington where he addressed the House of Representatives in February and March. Hiatt, ed., “Diary,” 97. For further corroboration consult The Diaries of Donald Mac-Donald 1824-1826 (Indiana Historical Society Publications, vol. XIV) (Indianapolis, 1942), 236, 296.
• 22.  The name of the community was not decided upon at first, the space being left blank in the preamble. Warren’s suggestion that the association adopt the title “Commonwealth of New Harmony” was negatived, and William Owen’s motion that the space remain blank was carried. The name “New Harmony Community of Equality” was adopted February 5, 1826. See “Minutes of the Convention for Forming a Constitution for the Society of New Harmony held Jan. 25, 1826,” February 2, 1826, February 5, 1826. The preamble is reproduced in the minutes for February 1, 1826. In the valuation list prepared at the direction of the select committee on February 8, 1826, Warren and his family were assigned $169 per annum. Warren might have arrived in the spring of 1825. MacDonald reported that several families arrived at New Harmony from Cincinnati between April 13 and April 24, but did not mention Warren specifically. MacDonald Diaries, 292.
• 23.  “When I reached New Harmony, early in 1826, . . . I looked at everything with eyes of enthusiasm. . . . The evening gatherings too, delighted me . . . the weekly concert, with an excellent leader, Josiah Warren, and a performance of music . . . much beyond what I had expected in the backwoods . . .” Robert Dale Owen, “My Experiences of Community Life,” in Atlantic Monthly, XXXII (September, 1873), 338.
• 24.  The first entry of the Warren family in the account book of the community store is dated March 8, 1826. The family pass books have never been located, and constitute another Warren document of considerable interest for which search continues. For a description of the account books see William Pelham to William Creese Pelham, September 7, 1825, in Harlow Lindley, ed., Indiana as Seen by Early Travellers (Indiana Historical Collections, vol. Ill) (Indianapolis, 1916), 371.
• 25.  Warren MSS. notebook, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, undated, unpaginated. This is another obscure Warren source, unrelated to the series of notebooks which are apparently in the nature of a diary, containing entries through June, 1873, and of which only one has so far been located. See note 13. For mention of the above document elsewhere, consult R. C. Stewart, “The Labadie Labor Collection,” in Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, LIII (May 10, 1947), 250.
• 26.  Periodical Letter, II (July, 1856), 55; Warren, Practical Details in Equitable Commerce, showing the workings in actual experiment, during a series of years, of the social principles expounded in the works called “Equitable Commerce” by the author of this and “The Science of Society,” by Stephen P. Andrews, 71, cited hereafter as Practical Details. A second edition from the same plates was published in 1854. Although this book was not published until 1852, some of the material existed in manuscript for twenty-five years before revision and release under the above title. For the most part, this latter work is the principal source of information concerning the decision to leave New Harmony and the events of the three years following. Any account of Warren’s early experiments in social reform is bound to rely upon it heavily.
• 27.  Warren’s views have been summarized adequately in Ely, Labor Movement, 238. A fuller treatment by Warren is contained in Periodical Letter, 2nd. series, I (December, 1856), 34.
• 28.  Periodical Letter, II (July, 1856), 55-56. Dr. Lyman O. Warren has raised some interesting points in speculating upon the intellectual origins of Josiah Warren’s unorthodox thinking. He has called attention to the observation of the famous philosopher George Santayana in his Persons and Places that the Brighton Warrens, of whom Josiah was a member, were “a dissentient family.” Santayana was a boyhood friend of the uncles of Dr. Warren. The record for independent intransigence appears to go back at least as far as his first American ancestors. John Warren of the Arbella is noted in Bond’s History of Watertown as having been arrested on one occasion for nonattendance at church and for harboring Quakers on another. Further investigation into the family prior to migration to America, itself an act of extraordinary self-assertion and independence, might establish a much longer record of nonconformism. A future biographer of Josiah Warren might well consider the pertinence of this durable tradition.
• 29.  Six years after leaving New Harmony, Warren wrote, “It is the influence of surrounding circumstances which . . . divided society into rich and poor, which enables some to command and others unable to do otherwise than obey. It is the influence of circumstances which produces different classes in society, and that influence only, which divides men into different political parties and ranges them under different banners of religion. . . . It will be seen that this knowledge warrants us in making a critical examination into our own condition, and all the circumstances which have surrounded us from birth, to see whether they have been . . . such as are most favorable to our happiness, and it teaches us not to reverence or perpetuate bad circumstances simply because we are born under them. . . . This knowledge therefore lays a broad, rational and consistent foundation for unlimited improvement; . . .” The Peaceful Revolutionist, I (February 5, 1833), 5. This short-lived Warren periodical continues to be considered the first anarchist publication in existence.
• 30.  Warren MSS., Labadie Collection, undated entry in notebook. It is thought from the arrangement of the material that this notebook was intended as reference at impromptu meetings in private homes, where Warren was a more convincing speaker than he was on the public lecture platform.
• 31.  The idea of paper money representing a certain amount of labor rather than a certain precious commodity was held in common and developed separately by several radical economic thinkers in the first half of the nineteenth century as well. Besides Owen in England, similar conceptions on a different scale can be found in the writings of John Gray, A Lecture on Human Happiness (London, 1825); William Thompson, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness (London, 1824; another edition, 1850); John Francis Bray, Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy; or, the Age of Might and the Age of Right (Leeds, 1839). Johann Karl Rodbertus in Germany and Pierre Joseph Proudhon in France evolved similar monetary substitutions. Short summaries of their theories can be found in Edward C. K. Gonner, The Social Philosophy of Rodbertus (London, 1899); Dennis W. Brogan, Proudhon (London, 1934); Henry Cohen, Proudhon’s Solution of the Social Problem (New York, 1927). The simplicity of application of this idea by Warren is unique during a time confined almost entirely to theorizing about this matter.
• 32.  These were later published as a bound collection under this title. (Manchester, Eng. 1837). A contemporary edition appeared in London in 1813 under the title A New View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, with separate pagination.
• 33.  Consult Edger A. J. Johnson, Predecessors of Adam Smith (New York, 1937), Chapters XII-XIII, for a development of the background of the labor cost theory. Whether Warren was acquainted with the writings of Adam Smith is not known but unlikely. However Proudhon, developing a similar line of thought to Warren in a French environment, mentioned Smith, along with the Bible and Hegel as his three principal sources of inspiration. Zenker, Anarchism, 35.
• 34.  The following extract from the diary of William Owen, referring to his father’s visit in Kentucky on the way to New Harmony in the late fall of 1824, is of great interest in the effort to assign proper credit for the labor note idea: “We walked through the town-Mayesville [sic] and found a good front and a tolerable second street. Hunter and my father bought mits and Mr. Owen had a bantering conve[r]sation with the storekeeper regarding money and labor notes. He told us that a gallon of whisky, which will make twelve individuals quite drunk, can be bought for 12½ cents.” Hiatt, ed., “Diary of William Owen,” 61. Italics are the present writer’s.
• 35.  John R. Commons and Associates, A Documentary History of Industrial Society, V, 79.
• 36.  Practical Details, 75.
• 37.  It should be remembered that Warren’s continual use of the term “equitable commerce” occurred with the understanding that the word “commerce” was being used in its overall sense as the sum total of human activities and not merely economic considerations alone. There is no doubt that Warren believed that major reforms in the economic sphere were the most important, nevertheless.
• 38.  The first systematic and extended arrangement of Warren’s convictions was his Equitable Commerce: a new developement [sic] of principles for the harmonious adjustment and regulation of the pecuniary, intellectual and moral intercourse of mankind, proposed as elements of New Society (New Harmony, Ind., 1846), hereafter cited as Equitable Commerce.
• 39.  Ely, Labor Movement, 238; Warren, Practical Details, 13.
• 40.  An admirable summation of Warren’s philosophy of individualism is that of Thomas Low Nichols, Forty Years of American Life, II, 39. Nichols’ relations with Warren and the anarchists at “Modern Times” will be found in Chapter III.
• 41.  Warren, Practical Details, 13. Capitalized portions are Warren’s.
• 42.  Practical Details, above.
• 43.  Practical Details, 14.
• 44.  Practical Details, above.
• 45.  On his return to Cincinnati, Warren leased the tract of land bounded by Elm, John, Fifth and Ninth Streets from Nicholas Longworth for 99 years. His return of the lease to Longworth is anomalous, in view of the fact that he still conceived of land as a commodity and subject to purchase and sale. The loss of this tract as a bargaining weapon must have been keenly felt at the time consideration of a colony site was taking place. See George Warren, “Josiah Warren,” 2, for a summary of this curious incident.
• 46.  Practical Details, 14.
• 47.  The earliest proposal for the employment of labor notes in England similar to those which enjoyed widespread use in Warren’s Cincinnati store is that of the Brighton Co-Operative Benevolent Fund Association, in November, 1827, six months after their successful introduction in the Ohio pioneer venture. The operation of the store and the determination of the value of the labor notes differed slightly from that already functioning in America. One of the plates from which the English labor notes were printed is in the collection of the Workingmen’s Institute. See the description of the English plan in Podmore, Robert Owen, 386, quoting from the Cooperative Magazine of November, 1827.
• 48.  Quarterly Letter, I, 6.
• 49.  Quarterly Letter, I, above. The amount charged to pay this item was a variable in Warren’s plan. By the fifth month of the first year the amount added to original cost had been reduced to four per cent. Twenty years later he recommended adding six per cent to the original cost. Practical Details, 22; Equitable Commerce, 61.
• 50.  Practical Details, 15.
• 51.  Practical Details, 29.
• 52.  The Peaceful Revolutionist, I (February 5, 1833), 6. Warren skirted barter economy but briefly, even though he saw nothing particularly invidious about its operation if the need of either party involved did not constitute a margin sufficiently noticeable to promote exploitation one by the other.
• 53.  Quarterly Letter, I, 6.
• 54.  Warren, True Civilization an Immediate Necessity and the Last Ground of Hope for Mankind. Being the Results and Conclusions of Thirty-nine Years’ Laborious Study and Experiments in Civilization as it is, and in Different Enterprises for Reconstruction, 88, hereafter cited as True Civilization an Immediate Necessity; Practical Details, 15.
• 55.  Warren MSS., Labadie Collection, “A Scrap of History,” undated and un-paginated. This brief manuscript appears to be part of another attempted publication, but a comparison with his published works indicates that it remained unused.
• 56.  The first customer in the time store was Warren’s brother, according to Warren’s account. He recalled prevailing upon him to make the first purchase to start the experiment, “desperate with disappointment and chagrin” at the failure of three friends to make promised transactions. Warren, Practical Details, 17-18. Two weeks after the Time Store opened, the Western Tiller of Cincinnati began publication of a series of eight dispatches, which ran from June 1 through July 27, written by “A Late Member of New Harmony,” and addressed “To the Friends of the Social System,” which, based on the criteria of internal criticism, must be attributed to Warren. These essays are not only prepared in his peculiar style, but amount to a trial run of some of the ideas to be found later in Equitable Commerce.
• 57.  Practical Details, 24; Peaceful Revolutionist, I (April 5, 1833), 15,
• 58.  Practical Details, 22, 25, 31.
• 59.  This was Richard Folger, who with John Pickering, were among the earliest supporters of equity. Pickering later broke with Warren at the time of the commencement of “Utopia,” some twenty years later. Practical Details, 33; Periodical Letter, I, 2nd. series, supplement 2, p. 2; Peaceful Revolutionist, II (May, 1848), 13-15.
• 60.  Peaceful Revolutionist, I (February 5, 1833), 6.
• 61.  See Warren’s letter to the Mechanic’s Free Press (Philadelphia, 1827-1831), May 10, 1828, p. 2, quoted in Commons, Documentary History, V, 133-137.
• 62.  Practical Details, 16; Peaceful Revolutionist, I (February 5, 1833), 7.
• 63.  Practical Details, 27, 29.
• 64.  Compare prices reported by Warren in 1827 in Practical Details, 21, 23, 27.
• 65.  The following is a representative example: “Bought three barrels of rice at Haydn & Co’s. auction at 1½ cents a pound, and am selling it out at 1¾, while the customary price for so good an article has uniformly been 8 cents a pound; people are coming from all directions to get it . . .” Practical Details, 26.
• 66.  This has been a controversial point among interested observers, although Warren leaves no doubt about the matter. For confirmation of the three year duration see Peaceful Revolutionist, I (February 5, 1833), 7; The Herald of Equity, I (February, 1841), 6.
• 67.  Practical Details, 40.
• 68.  Practical Details, 23. Saunders later wrote for the Free Enquirer under the pseudonym “Philanthropos.” Free Enquirer, I, new series, (December 31, 1829), 79; Periodical Letter, I, 2nd. series, (January, 1858), 98-101.
• 69.  Ely stated that Warren did a total business of $150,000 during the operation of the time store, but Warren’s contemporary accounts were much more modest than this. In March, 1829 he revealed that he had never utilized more than $4,000 in the proceedings up to that time, and that he had retailed a total of about $30,000 worth of goods. Warren had actually begun the process of liquidation of the store at this time, but shortly revived it again. It is unlikely that his volume quintupled in the next year of operations. Ely, Labor Movement, 239; Practical Details, 31-32.
• 70.  Practical Details, 41.
• 71.  Practical Details, 42.
• 72.  True Civilization an Immediate Necessity, 107-108.
• 73.  Practical Details, 43.
• 74.  The fullest work on the most famous of Owen’s sons is Richard W. Leopold, Robert Dale Owen, A Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 1940). This stresses his later life as an Indiana political figure and convert to spiritualism and largely dismisses his activities as a reformer and freethinker. For another treatment with differing interpretations see Elinor Pancoast and Anne E. Lincoln, The Incorrigible Idealist, Robert Dale Owen in America (Bloomington, Ind., 1940).
• 75.  The most recent work of extensive character is the sympathetic study by Alice J. G. Perkins and Theresa Wolf son, Frances Wright, Free Enquirer (New York, 1939). Of considerable use also is William R. Waterman, Frances Wright (Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, vol. CXV, no. 1) (New York, 1924).
• 76.  A valuable account of this journal may be found in Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1741-1850 (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), 536-538.
• 77.  This was also true of Philadelphia, where The Mechanic’s Free Press had already made Warren’s views known to the workingmen of the city. Three stores involving Warren’s plan had begun operating in this city before the Cincinnati store completed its second year. Mechanic’s Free Press, May 17, September 20, 1828; March 14, 1829.
• 78.  Practical Details, 43.
• 79.  Bailie, Josiah Warren, 25.
• 80.  Waterman notes the influence of Warren in Frances Wright’s proposed reconstruction of society. Frances Wright, 251. When the two first became acquainted is uncertain; no evidence exists to support the contention that their association dates from New Harmony days, as Warren undoubtedly left the colony before Fanny’s residence was established. However, they had begun exchanging ideas in Cincinnati before she left for New York. Shortly before Warren undertook his own trip to the East, she recalled being at his home in Cincinnati in 1828, the occasion for this comment being the appearance of a lamp in the New York scene which she claimed was a theft of the earlier one patented by Warren in 1821. The Free Enquirer, II (May 22, 1830), 240. See also her favorable sketch of Warren and his accomplishments in The Free Enquirer, II (October 23, 1830), 412. It is interesting to observe that this comment, somewhat uncritical and ignorant of several facts concerning the Warren venture, was written after he had left New York and returned to the West. There is no indication that Robert Dale Owen had lost any confidence in the eventual success of a coöperative village from the spirit of this communication.
• 81.  Warren’s short notice was headed “To the Friends of the Equal Exchange of Labor in the West” and was dated July 4, 1830. The Free Enquirer, II (July 17, 1830), 301-302.
• 82.  The old clay cast method was employed in constructing the stereotype plate, and the substitution of a mixture of shellac, tar and sand for type metal was an unusual departure. Still another mixture, consisting of clay, sand, beeswax, tallow, oil, gum arabic and stearine for the purpose of making fine-surface engravings was also perfected at this time. For a comparison with the earlier stereotyping devices, see Thomas Hodgson, An Essay on the Origin and Progress of Stereotype Printing (Newcastle, England, 1820), 13-14; Theodore L. De Vinne, Printing in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1924), 6; New Harmony Gazette, I, 255, the latter for a description of the Lanefelder process developed in Austria in 1826, which aroused the attention of the Owenites while Warren was a member of the community.
• 83.  A full description of the compositions involved can be found in Kubler, History of Stereotyping, 301.
• 84.  Warren’s first work, A New System of Musical Notation, published in New Harmony, was closely followed by the other that same year, A Collection of the Most Popular Church Music Written Upon Geometric or Scientific Principles, a group of excerpts from 56 popular church hymns of the 1840’s printed in a form adapted for use by brass bands. Speaking of his father’s innovation, George Warren, himself a widely known band leader in southern Indiana in later years, explained, “He dispensed with the sharp and flat signatures, and the tier and length of the stem gave the length of the note, and the piano or forte power was designated by the size of the note itself.” “Josiah Warren,” 4-5.
• 85.  Patent No. 4479 on “Composition for Stereotype Plates” was issued to Warren on April 25, 1846. C. S. Partridge, Stereotyping the Papier Mache Process (Chicago, 1892), 130. A certified copy of this patent, signed and sealed by Thomas Eubank, Commissioner of Patents, August 26, 1850, is in the Warren MSS. in the Workingmen’s Institute Library.
• 86.  Herbert A. Kellar, Solon Robinson Pioneer and Agriculturist (Indiana Historical Collections, vol. XXI) (2 vols. Indianapolis, 1936), II, 504-507. For references to Warren’s process in other papers see Prairie Farmer, V (June, 1845), 155-156; Daily Cincinnati Gazette, July 23, July 30, 1845; Indiana Statesman, July 26, September 13, September 20, October 4, 1845, the latter issues also carrying reprints from articles on this subject in the New York Sun, New York Morning News, Vincennes (Ind.) Gazette and Princeton (Ind.) Chronicle. Other notices appeared from time to time in other stopping-off places along Robinson’s route, including Evansville, and Shawneetown, Illinois.
• 87.  Indiana Statesman, July 4, August 16, October 11, December 27, 1845; January 31, February 14, 1846. The cut in the last issue cited was a superb five column spread, eight inches high, of the map of the disputed Oregon Territory.
• 88.  One of Waren’s interesting controversies was that carried on with the editor of the Indiana Statesman, during the time following the closing of the New Harmony time store. Although he respected Warren as a technical innovator in the printing and engraving field, Burns refused to print his articles on the labor exchange, calling them “long-winded stories,” and marvelling that in the obscurity Warren was able to develop any kind of a clearly expressed idea. Indiana Statesman, February 15, 1845.
• 89.  The title page carried the date 1846 as the date of publication. All citations below are from this rare original edition unless otherwise noted. A selection from this edition is included in Irving Mark and Eugene L. Schwab, (eds.), The Faith of Our Fathers; An Anthology of Americana, 1790-1860 (New York, 1952), 380-384.
• 90.  A second edition appeared in 1849 while Warren was at “Utopia” (Smith’s Landing), Ohio, while a third was published in New York in 1852. A slightly altered version, with the addition of an editor’s preface and a different appendix, under the title True Civilization: A Subject of Vital and Serious Interest to All People but Most Immediately to Men and Women of Labor and Sorrow, printed under Warren’s direction in diffondale, Mass., in 1869, became the fourth appearance of this work. The fifth edition, posthumously released by Benjamin Tucker at Princeton, Mass., in 1875 bore the same title and content as the 1869 edition. Other Warren works incorporated the first two words of the title of this latter version, which has been the cause of a considerable amount of confusion among bibliographers.
• 91.  Equitable Commerce, introduction, iii.
• 92.  The five basic principles of the Warrenite community were re-phrased a number of times, receiving their most concise statement in 1863:
• 93.  Equitable Commerce, 10.
• 94.  “The security of person and property requires that each and every individual should be the supreme law to himself and his own. That one should have no power over another’s person or property.” Equitable Commerce, 24.
• 95.  Warren believed that the fact that human beings were characterized by individual peculiarities and that it still was acknowledged and remained “un-smothered” made this the starting place for what he termed the “ascent towards order and harmony.” Equitable Commerce, 4.
• 96.  Equitable Commerce, 4-5.
• 97.  Equitable Commerce, 7.
• 98.  Warren averred that the term “sovereignty of the people” could mean nothing else except the sovereignty of each individual; “Where is the sovereignty of a people when the sovereignty of every individual is surrendered to votes of majorities, or to a few men appointed to interpret and administer laws and institutions?” Practical Details, 40.
• 99.  Equitable Commerce, 23.
• 100.  Warren was unconvinced that statute law had produced any decline in the number of violent crimes. He inveighed against capital punishment for murder as just another variety of murder, an act which did not perform the function of a deterrent to fresh crimes of the same type. Equitable Commerce, 22.
• 101.  Warren accused governments of having been responsible for more bloodshed and violence throughout history than could have possibly occurred in the absence of all governments. The indictment of government as an agent of destruction and mass murder has become a much-repeated anarchist arraignment in almost every land which has developed an anarchist press. Equitable Commerce, 19.
• 102.  Equitable Commerce, 22, 24.
• 103.  “. . . neither rulers nor ruled can tell how the laws will be interpreted or administered till they have been repeatedly infringed and punishment has been inflicted,” Warren observed, seeking to discover the precise moment when law began to disintegrate. Equitable Commerce, 20.
• 104.  Wars he described as “probably the greatest of all destroyers of property,” and professed to be able to find only two roots from which all wars had originated; “direct or indirect plunder” and “the privilege of governing.” Warren denied the right of any government to force its citizens to fight against their will. Equitable Commerce, 21, 44.
• 105.  Equitable Commerce, 27-28. The right to complete individual freedom, according to Warrenite principle, was qualified only by the responsibility of each to respect the individuality of each. Infringement of another’s sovereignty carried with it all consequences of such action. Warren believed that a harmonious society was impossible unless each member became individually responsible for his acts. The similarity of Warren and Herbert Spencer’s later “law of equal freedom” can be detected at this point, despite the divergent points of origin.
• 106.  Warren made no distinction between “government” and “state” as the classic anarchist writers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have generally done; a connotation of voluntarism has been imparted to the former and coercion to the latter of these terms.
• 107.  Equitable Commerce, 30-31.
• 108.  Equitable Commerce, 25, 28. There is no existing evidence that Warren at any time was a believer in biological or racial inequality.
• 109.  Equitable Commerce, 16, 41-42. It is important to observe the change in Warren’s attitude toward organized religion in the twenty years between the first time store and the publication of the first summary of his social philosophy. Once non-committal, he now classed all churchmen as non-producers with a personal interest in the preservation of the existing order.
• 110.  Equitable Commerce, 27, 31.
• 111.  Equitable Commerce, 34. Warren intimated that the existing basis of the “present” system of exchanges was more ideological than scientific, unworthy of satisfactory apology or incapable of prolonged resistance to an opposing system.
• 112.  Warren admitted that his idea of individual sovereignty would produce chaos if attempts were made to force it to function within the national state system, but he believed that it would prove successful in a world lacking national consciousness. Equitable Commerce, 24.
• 113.  Equitable Commerce, 26.
• 114.  Equitable Commerce, 67. The MacDonald Diaries reveal that Owen suggested a maximum community population of about 2000 while on board ship bound for America in the fall of 1824.
• 115.  Thus he gave voice to the complaint of the bilked consumer everywhere; “. . . there is scarcely an article of food, clothing, tools, or medicines that is fit for use . . . the vender does not make them but imports them beyond the reach of responsibility.” Equitable Commerce, 42-43.
• 116.  Equitable Commerce, 11-12, 17, 40-41, 45. Warren’s conception of machines was not as producers of unemployment but as reducers of the work day for all and social engines whose output should be shared on an equitable plan.
• 117.  Equitable Commerce, 41-42.
• 118.  Equitable Commerce, 16-17. His opposition to the taking of interest on money was as rigid as to the stand on rent.
• 119.  Equitable Commerce, 44-45. The occupation-and-use concept of land was a product of later theorists in the individualist anarchist group.
• 120.  “We must admit the claims of the hardest labor to the highest reward, or we deny our own rights, extinguish the little light we have obtained, and throw everything back into confusion.” Equitable Commerce, 52.
• 121.  Equitable Commerce, 77.
• 122.  Equitable Commerce, 75.
• 123.  Greene thought very highly of Proudhon, although critical of some character traits; “He was too fond of vainglorious distinction and notoriety, and his amiability . . . led him too often, notwithstanding the violence of his writings, to listen favorably to proposals of compromise for the sake of peace and friendship.” The Word, II (April, 1874), 4.
• 124.  Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 3 6-38.
• 125.  Mutual Banking (1850 ed.), 27-28; Radical Deficiency, introduction, vii, xi, xix; Higginson, Yesterdays, 175-176; The Word, XVIII (December, 1889), 2; Spirit of the Age, II, 51-52, 61, 69-71.
• 126.  See his published works on the subject; An Expository Sketch of a New Theory of Calculus (Paris, 1859); Explanation of the Theory of Calculus (Boston, 1870).
• 127.  Equality, 55-56.
• 128.  Equality, 73. Greene used the word “accident” in a way which might be applied to circumstances, environment, or to both.
• 129.  Equality, 70-71.
• 130.  Greene introduced over 30 separate petitions signed by several thousand women requesting permission to vote on the amendments and alterations to the state constitution. Consult appendices in Official Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the State Convention, Assembled May 4th, 1853, to Revise and Amend the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (3 vols. Boston, 1853); Journal of the Constitutional Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Begun and Held in Boston on the Fourth Day of May, 1853 (Boston, 1853).
• 131.  Higginson is responsible for the account describing Greene’s resignation from the Union Army as the result of a political quarrel. Conflicting stories are found in other sources. See Record of the Massachusetts Volunteers, 18611865 (2 vols. Boston, 1868), I, 470; James L. Bowen, Massachusetts in the War 1861-1865 (Springfield, Mass., 1889), 250, 724; Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines in the Civil War (7 vols. Norwood, Mass., 1932), V, 554-556.
• 132.  Greene reprinted a translation of Proudhon’s famous essay, The State, from the Voix du Peuple of December 3, 1849, in which the latter first used the term “anarchy” as a synonym for the stateless society, in The Word, I (August, 1872), 2.
• 133.  The Word, IV (March, 1876), 3.
• 134.  Fragments, 227. See pp. 237-261 in same work for a verbatim account of the address delivered before the N. E. L. R. L.
• 135.  His translation of Proudhon’s What Is Property? began appearing in The Word in January, 1874, at which time he declared, “You will perceive that Proudhon and our friend Josiah Warren smite on substantially the same anvil.” Warren abruptly repudiated the comparison. The Word, II (January, 1874), 4; The Word, II (March, 1874), 2. It would appear that Warren was aware of Proudhon two decades before this. In the first number of the Periodical Letter, I (July, 1854), 22, Warren wrote the following: “It has been said by ‘Reformers’ that ‘all property was robbery’ but this idea followed out would give every one as much claim upon the products of labor as the producer himself had—of course this would constitute universal robbery and world wide confusion.” It would appear from the context that Warren was referring to Proudhon’s Qu’est ce que la Propriete? but it is unlikely that he had read this work, and would have to be charged with misunderstanding Proudhon’s position.
• 136.  The most famous of these petitions, that of April 6, 1873, signed by John Orvis, William B. Wright, Greene, Heywood and Tucker, is reprinted in Fragments, appendix. See also The Word, II (May, 1873), 2.
• 137.  See obituary in The Word, VII (July, 1878), 2.
• 138.  The most recent edition is that of the Modern Publishers of Indore, India, under the auspices of the Indian Sociological Review, in 1946.
• 139 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.
• 140 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.
• 141 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.
• 142 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.
• 143 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.
• 144 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.
• 145 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.
• 146 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.
• 147 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.
• 148  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.
• 149  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).
• 150  “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.
• 151  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.
• 152The details concerning Warren’s birthplace and parentage are still obscure. Beyond the knowledge of his birth in 1798, practically nothing of an authoritative nature exists. One thing is quite definite, nevertheless; sharing an illustrious colonial name did not mean a similar sharing of the general good fortune of the Warren clan. The year 1819 found him making the familiar trek westward and southward down the Ohio which a vast number of Americans continued to make until the midway point in the century was reached, with the principal aim in view of bettering their economic conditions. Warren and an elder brother, George, had shown considerable promise as musicians while still very young, and had become members of the “Old Boston Brigade Band” while still boys of school age. When he and his recently-acquired wife settled in Cincinnati, Josiah continued to earn his livelihood as a musician and teacher of music, an activity he never completely deserted.
• 153The change of locale seems to have sharpened a native inventive genius. Here he began a restless career of invention and innovation in the fields of illumination, printing-press manufacture, stereotyping and musical notation worthy of closer examination in connection with contributions of the Ohio valley to the growing industrial consciousness of the nation. His first contribution was a lamp of revolutionary construction, devised to burn lard instead of the much costlier tallow. It had unusual success, and led to the construction and operation of a factory devoted to its production which prospered, lard oil not yet being known.
• 154It is highly probable that with this background and bent, Josiah Warren might have become one of the early men of wealth in the growing Midwest, had not the personality of Robert Owen intruded and so impressed him with the exciting and disturbing spirit of social reform. Owen’s attempt to remake the pattern of mankind’s affairs is doubtless an occurrence without comparison in the social history of the new West. One of the few early industrial millionaires, the Welsh textile magnate and philanthropist conceived of a new world on a scale which was lavish far beyond the imagination of his time.
• 155Owen was an environmental determinist. Beginning with the assumption that human nature was a constant, he related all behavior patterns to subsequent reactions to environmental forces. The core of his doctrine was that man’s character was a product of exterior stress which he as an individual had no appreciable part in forming. Thus the social system was responsible for its wayward folk, and desirable modes of conduct could be brought about by proper education and supervision. Owen decried the idea of personal responsibility, believing the tenet absurd and productive only of harm; praise and blame on a personal level formed no part of his working social vocabulary.
• 156Having already partially developed his environmental thesis in his model factory town of New Lanark, Scotland, which enjoyed unsurpassed living and working conditions, Owen was determined to put it into operation on an even more striking level, with a new continent as a backdrop. He purchased the colony of Harmony, Indiana from its founders and occupants, a divergent German Lutheran sect known as Rappites. A communal venture with a deeply religious flavor, this group had developed an extensive and strikingly productive estate out of raw wilderness on the Indiana bank of the Wabash River some fifty miles upstream from its juncture with the Ohio. Desiring once more to return to their earlier home in western Pennsylvania, they sold the tract of 30,000 acres of land and the sturdy buildings thereon to Owen for the sum of $150,000. He then renamed it New Harmony and brought in settlers sympathetic to his philosophy and anxious to experience practical success. It was the largest and most promising experiment in environmentalism in the nineteenth century.
• 157Having already partially developed his environmental thesis in his model factory town of New Lanark, Scotland, which enjoyed unsurpassed living and working conditions, Owen was determined to put it into operation on an even more striking level, with a new continent as a backdrop. He purchased the colony of Harmony, Indiana from its founders and occupants, a divergent German Lutheran sect known as Rappites. A communal venture with a deeply religious flavor, this group had developed an extensive and strikingly productive estate out of raw wilderness on the Indiana bank of the Wabash River some fifty miles upstream from its juncture with the Ohio. Desiring once more to return to their earlier home in western Pennsylvania, they sold the tract of 30,000 acres of land and the sturdy buildings thereon to Owen for the sum of $150,000. He then renamed it New Harmony and brought in settlers sympathetic to his philosophy and anxious to experience practical success. It was the largest and most promising experiment in environmentalism in the nineteenth century.
• 158Having already partially developed his environmental thesis in his model factory town of New Lanark, Scotland, which enjoyed unsurpassed living and working conditions, Owen was determined to put it into operation on an even more striking level, with a new continent as a backdrop. He purchased the colony of Harmony, Indiana from its founders and occupants, a divergent German Lutheran sect known as Rappites. A communal venture with a deeply religious flavor, this group had developed an extensive and strikingly productive estate out of raw wilderness on the Indiana bank of the Wabash River some fifty miles upstream from its juncture with the Ohio. Desiring once more to return to their earlier home in western Pennsylvania, they sold the tract of 30,000 acres of land and the sturdy buildings thereon to Owen for the sum of $150,000. He then renamed it New Harmony and brought in settlers sympathetic to his philosophy and anxious to experience practical success. It was the largest and most promising experiment in environmentalism in the nineteenth century.
• 159Warren was to know the exhilaration and dejection of the founding and decline of the Owenite interlude at New Harmony before striking out on his own as a social radical. Although unable to hear Owen speak until 1825, he was a member of the first group gathering for the purpose of forming a community of property at the appointed place. By the fall of this same year he was taking active party in the Preliminary Society, and was a participant in the drafting and approving of the first constitution of the New Harmony Community of Equality in February, 1826. His musical training was soon employed; as leader of the community’s band, he was long remembered by the first settlers. By the late winter Warren, his wife and baby daughter were an established family unit of the settlement, and were to remain there for over a year.
• 160Warren was to know the exhilaration and dejection of the founding and decline of the Owenite interlude at New Harmony before striking out on his own as a social radical. Although unable to hear Owen speak until 1825, he was a member of the first group gathering for the purpose of forming a community of property at the appointed place. By the fall of this same year he was taking active party in the Preliminary Society, and was a participant in the drafting and approving of the first constitution of the New Harmony Community of Equality in February, 1826. His musical training was soon employed; as leader of the community’s band, he was long remembered by the first settlers. By the late winter Warren, his wife and baby daughter were an established family unit of the settlement, and were to remain there for over a year.
• 161Warren was to know the exhilaration and dejection of the founding and decline of the Owenite interlude at New Harmony before striking out on his own as a social radical. Although unable to hear Owen speak until 1825, he was a member of the first group gathering for the purpose of forming a community of property at the appointed place. By the fall of this same year he was taking active party in the Preliminary Society, and was a participant in the drafting and approving of the first constitution of the New Harmony Community of Equality in February, 1826. His musical training was soon employed; as leader of the community’s band, he was long remembered by the first settlers. By the late winter Warren, his wife and baby daughter were an established family unit of the settlement, and were to remain there for over a year.
• 162Warren was to know the exhilaration and dejection of the founding and decline of the Owenite interlude at New Harmony before striking out on his own as a social radical. Although unable to hear Owen speak until 1825, he was a member of the first group gathering for the purpose of forming a community of property at the appointed place. By the fall of this same year he was taking active party in the Preliminary Society, and was a participant in the drafting and approving of the first constitution of the New Harmony Community of Equality in February, 1826. His musical training was soon employed; as leader of the community’s band, he was long remembered by the first settlers. By the late winter Warren, his wife and baby daughter were an established family unit of the settlement, and were to remain there for over a year.
• 163Warren made a quick and incisive deduction as to the cause of the debacle which placed him at once in a camp far removed from that in which the faithful Owenites would henceforth gather. He felt that the common property scheme of the New Harmony colony had been instituted by Owen as a means and not as an end; that what had been desired was a social situation in which the interests of the different individuals would coöperate instead of clash one with the other. Even though thirty years of retrospection upon the experience continued to bring back pleasant memories of what had transpired there, the management of financial and property affairs convinced him of the failure of their mission; “but for property considerations the experiments never would have commenced,” was his pithy summation of the situation. Why did an amicable settlement of material affairs fail to become a reality? Warren blamed it upon the submergence of the individual within the confines of the community. The consequences of such a procedure, said Warren, were inevitable. Not only was individual initiative stifled by failure to provide a place within the structure for personal rights and interests beyond the sphere of religious matters, but the elimination of individual property rights resulted in almost total dissipation of responsibility for the occurrence of individual incapacity, failure, and short-comings of other kinds. This was not all. He had noted that the expressions of natural differences of opinion were increasingly looked upon as unfortunate developments and obstacles to success, which had damaging effect on the continuance of courtesy and tolerance. Thus, despite frequent reorganizations, failures became more abrupt and chaos drew nearer. Warren summed up the whole matter in one vigorous outburst:
• 164Warren made a quick and incisive deduction as to the cause of the debacle which placed him at once in a camp far removed from that in which the faithful Owenites would henceforth gather. He felt that the common property scheme of the New Harmony colony had been instituted by Owen as a means and not as an end; that what had been desired was a social situation in which the interests of the different individuals would coöperate instead of clash one with the other. Even though thirty years of retrospection upon the experience continued to bring back pleasant memories of what had transpired there, the management of financial and property affairs convinced him of the failure of their mission; “but for property considerations the experiments never would have commenced,” was his pithy summation of the situation. Why did an amicable settlement of material affairs fail to become a reality? Warren blamed it upon the submergence of the individual within the confines of the community. The consequences of such a procedure, said Warren, were inevitable. Not only was individual initiative stifled by failure to provide a place within the structure for personal rights and interests beyond the sphere of religious matters, but the elimination of individual property rights resulted in almost total dissipation of responsibility for the occurrence of individual incapacity, failure, and short-comings of other kinds. This was not all. He had noted that the expressions of natural differences of opinion were increasingly looked upon as unfortunate developments and obstacles to success, which had damaging effect on the continuance of courtesy and tolerance. Thus, despite frequent reorganizations, failures became more abrupt and chaos drew nearer. Warren summed up the whole matter in one vigorous outburst:
• 165Warren made a quick and incisive deduction as to the cause of the debacle which placed him at once in a camp far removed from that in which the faithful Owenites would henceforth gather. He felt that the common property scheme of the New Harmony colony had been instituted by Owen as a means and not as an end; that what had been desired was a social situation in which the interests of the different individuals would coöperate instead of clash one with the other. Even though thirty years of retrospection upon the experience continued to bring back pleasant memories of what had transpired there, the management of financial and property affairs convinced him of the failure of their mission; “but for property considerations the experiments never would have commenced,” was his pithy summation of the situation. Why did an amicable settlement of material affairs fail to become a reality? Warren blamed it upon the submergence of the individual within the confines of the community. The consequences of such a procedure, said Warren, were inevitable. Not only was individual initiative stifled by failure to provide a place within the structure for personal rights and interests beyond the sphere of religious matters, but the elimination of individual property rights resulted in almost total dissipation of responsibility for the occurrence of individual incapacity, failure, and short-comings of other kinds. This was not all. He had noted that the expressions of natural differences of opinion were increasingly looked upon as unfortunate developments and obstacles to success, which had damaging effect on the continuance of courtesy and tolerance. Thus, despite frequent reorganizations, failures became more abrupt and chaos drew nearer. Warren summed up the whole matter in one vigorous outburst:
• 166Warren made a quick and incisive deduction as to the cause of the debacle which placed him at once in a camp far removed from that in which the faithful Owenites would henceforth gather. He felt that the common property scheme of the New Harmony colony had been instituted by Owen as a means and not as an end; that what had been desired was a social situation in which the interests of the different individuals would coöperate instead of clash one with the other. Even though thirty years of retrospection upon the experience continued to bring back pleasant memories of what had transpired there, the management of financial and property affairs convinced him of the failure of their mission; “but for property considerations the experiments never would have commenced,” was his pithy summation of the situation. Why did an amicable settlement of material affairs fail to become a reality? Warren blamed it upon the submergence of the individual within the confines of the community. The consequences of such a procedure, said Warren, were inevitable. Not only was individual initiative stifled by failure to provide a place within the structure for personal rights and interests beyond the sphere of religious matters, but the elimination of individual property rights resulted in almost total dissipation of responsibility for the occurrence of individual incapacity, failure, and short-comings of other kinds. This was not all. He had noted that the expressions of natural differences of opinion were increasingly looked upon as unfortunate developments and obstacles to success, which had damaging effect on the continuance of courtesy and tolerance. Thus, despite frequent reorganizations, failures became more abrupt and chaos drew nearer. Warren summed up the whole matter in one vigorous outburst:
• 167Although Warren broke sharply with Owen’s collective plans for producing the good life, in other respects the cleavage was not so clearly marked. Indeed, his championing of individual sovereignty was to posit a dilemma which was never satisfactorily reconciled. His writings continued to put forth the doctrine of environmentalism, but liberally interleaved with a persistent promotion of belief in free will and individual responsibility which Owen would have categorically dismissed as prime heresy. Conventional society lost Warren forever, despite all this. For almost half a century he followed a course of ceaseless activity, attempting several experiments embracing his own conception of societary reorganization. He never repudiated Owen in an overt way, his attitude toward the founder of New Harmony remaining one of deep respect to his last days. Many years after the break took place Warren declared:
• 168Although Warren broke sharply with Owen’s collective plans for producing the good life, in other respects the cleavage was not so clearly marked. Indeed, his championing of individual sovereignty was to posit a dilemma which was never satisfactorily reconciled. His writings continued to put forth the doctrine of environmentalism, but liberally interleaved with a persistent promotion of belief in free will and individual responsibility which Owen would have categorically dismissed as prime heresy. Conventional society lost Warren forever, despite all this. For almost half a century he followed a course of ceaseless activity, attempting several experiments embracing his own conception of societary reorganization. He never repudiated Owen in an overt way, his attitude toward the founder of New Harmony remaining one of deep respect to his last days. Many years after the break took place Warren declared:
• 169One element of Owen’s thought found ready acceptance, in contrast to the lukewarm attitude toward social experimentation. In the hands of Warren and a large number of Warren’s followers throughout the remander of the century, the basic economic doctrine of coöperation met no opposition whatever, despite the serious trouble encountered in putting it into action. This was the proposal to exchange all labor employed in the production of goods and services equally, hour for hour, substituting for the state or privately controlled currency based on metallic commodities a circulating medium consisting of “labor notes.” These were simply bills issued in the form of currency, limited in issue and signed by the issuer, promising to furnish labor at specified occupations or activities for specific periods, in exchange for services desired of and rendered by another. These were to be issued on the basis of hours of labor or fractions of hours, depending upon the amount of another’s labor consumed.
• 170Owen had been mulling over the labor theory of value before coming to America. His four Essays on the Formation of Human Character, published in New Lanark in 1812-1813, contained indications of his whole-hearted conversion to this doctrine. The contention that the true price of a thing is the amount of labor expended in its production had been espoused by political economists generations before Adam Smith, although Smith had stated it in classic form in 1776. Owen’s labor note idea was a ground-breaker in the direction of practical realization of this idea, and this he also had fully developed in his own mind before reaching New Harmony.
• 171Owen had been mulling over the labor theory of value before coming to America. His four Essays on the Formation of Human Character, published in New Lanark in 1812-1813, contained indications of his whole-hearted conversion to this doctrine. The contention that the true price of a thing is the amount of labor expended in its production had been espoused by political economists generations before Adam Smith, although Smith had stated it in classic form in 1776. Owen’s labor note idea was a ground-breaker in the direction of practical realization of this idea, and this he also had fully developed in his own mind before reaching New Harmony.
• 172Owen had been mulling over the labor theory of value before coming to America. His four Essays on the Formation of Human Character, published in New Lanark in 1812-1813, contained indications of his whole-hearted conversion to this doctrine. The contention that the true price of a thing is the amount of labor expended in its production had been espoused by political economists generations before Adam Smith, although Smith had stated it in classic form in 1776. Owen’s labor note idea was a ground-breaker in the direction of practical realization of this idea, and this he also had fully developed in his own mind before reaching New Harmony.
• 173Warren became a permanent convert to this new system, propagandizing for its adoption both verbally and through practical attempts for almost forty-five years. Its operation was never realized at New Harmony, so Josiah Warren became the first person to employ the device in everyday economic intercourse. His Cincinnati Time Store of 1827-1830 became the first scientific experiment in coöperative economy in modern history, despite its limited objectives as such, as well as its obscurity resulting from the modest unsophisticated structure employed and the stark utilitarianism which prevailed during its existence.
• 174While Warren was forming his own philosophy, rejecting part of Owen’s convictions and accepting another part, his New Harmony experiences as a member of the original Community of Equality were producing other repercussions. His observation of human differences, among other things, shattered his faith in the ideal of economic equality. Basing his conclusions on the assumption that different persons put differing amounts of energy and time toward the accomplishment of various ends, and satisfied with the motivational drives which “enlightened self-interest” might supply, he proposed the substitution of the ideal of equal opportunities to the access to land, raw materials and credit. Equal opportunities being provided, individual differences and completely free competition would gradually work toward the establishment of an equitable society, in which returns would be measured by the amount of work performed, both quantitatively and qualitatively. To Warren the striving for equity was the highest possible goal of human effort.
• 175While Warren was forming his own philosophy, rejecting part of Owen’s convictions and accepting another part, his New Harmony experiences as a member of the original Community of Equality were producing other repercussions. His observation of human differences, among other things, shattered his faith in the ideal of economic equality. Basing his conclusions on the assumption that different persons put differing amounts of energy and time toward the accomplishment of various ends, and satisfied with the motivational drives which “enlightened self-interest” might supply, he proposed the substitution of the ideal of equal opportunities to the access to land, raw materials and credit. Equal opportunities being provided, individual differences and completely free competition would gradually work toward the establishment of an equitable society, in which returns would be measured by the amount of work performed, both quantitatively and qualitatively. To Warren the striving for equity was the highest possible goal of human effort.
• 176Warren’s complete program was a cumulative affair which did not receive definitive statement for almost twenty years. A part of this period of growth was his growing disregard for constituted authority, partially a product of attachment to a number of attitudes which convinced him that institutional government was a superfluous part of human society. His primary source of dissatisfaction with what he called the “communistic experiments” in New Harmony was the combination of interests. This combination required, as he saw it, a government based on authority and demanding obedience which resulted in the death of individual liberty. The alternative which he proposed and crusaded for was a system based on voluntary coöperation, but at no place rising above any individual within its structure; “the sovereignty of the individual” had to be preserved at all costs. This matter he considered more important than any artificial arrangement of individuals which demanded the fidelity of all. There was no compensation which could equate the sacrifice of this principle of individuality. There is a frontier flavor to his own blunt declaration of individualist war upon the hobbling tendencies of institutionalism which still commands at-tention:
• 177Warren’s complete program was a cumulative affair which did not receive definitive statement for almost twenty years. A part of this period of growth was his growing disregard for constituted authority, partially a product of attachment to a number of attitudes which convinced him that institutional government was a superfluous part of human society. His primary source of dissatisfaction with what he called the “communistic experiments” in New Harmony was the combination of interests. This combination required, as he saw it, a government based on authority and demanding obedience which resulted in the death of individual liberty. The alternative which he proposed and crusaded for was a system based on voluntary coöperation, but at no place rising above any individual within its structure; “the sovereignty of the individual” had to be preserved at all costs. This matter he considered more important than any artificial arrangement of individuals which demanded the fidelity of all. There was no compensation which could equate the sacrifice of this principle of individuality. There is a frontier flavor to his own blunt declaration of individualist war upon the hobbling tendencies of institutionalism which still commands at-tention:
• 178Warren’s complete program was a cumulative affair which did not receive definitive statement for almost twenty years. A part of this period of growth was his growing disregard for constituted authority, partially a product of attachment to a number of attitudes which convinced him that institutional government was a superfluous part of human society. His primary source of dissatisfaction with what he called the “communistic experiments” in New Harmony was the combination of interests. This combination required, as he saw it, a government based on authority and demanding obedience which resulted in the death of individual liberty. The alternative which he proposed and crusaded for was a system based on voluntary coöperation, but at no place rising above any individual within its structure; “the sovereignty of the individual” had to be preserved at all costs. This matter he considered more important than any artificial arrangement of individuals which demanded the fidelity of all. There was no compensation which could equate the sacrifice of this principle of individuality. There is a frontier flavor to his own blunt declaration of individualist war upon the hobbling tendencies of institutionalism which still commands at-tention:
• 179Warren’s complete program was a cumulative affair which did not receive definitive statement for almost twenty years. A part of this period of growth was his growing disregard for constituted authority, partially a product of attachment to a number of attitudes which convinced him that institutional government was a superfluous part of human society. His primary source of dissatisfaction with what he called the “communistic experiments” in New Harmony was the combination of interests. This combination required, as he saw it, a government based on authority and demanding obedience which resulted in the death of individual liberty. The alternative which he proposed and crusaded for was a system based on voluntary coöperation, but at no place rising above any individual within its structure; “the sovereignty of the individual” had to be preserved at all costs. This matter he considered more important than any artificial arrangement of individuals which demanded the fidelity of all. There was no compensation which could equate the sacrifice of this principle of individuality. There is a frontier flavor to his own blunt declaration of individualist war upon the hobbling tendencies of institutionalism which still commands at-tention:
• 180Using this concept of individualism, then it appeared logical to him that interests, responsibilities and actions all had to be confined to this level.
• 181To solve this problem Warren brought forth the labor exchange idea which he had absorbed from Owen and which remained firmly planted in his mind. This became his initial action in the effort to promote adoption of a satisfactory method of effecting equitable exchanges, paying little attention to the complexities which had grown upon this branch of human relations through centuries of changing ethical approaches. Nevertheless, an economy based on the exchange of equivalents, or as he termed it, “labor for labor,” became the basis for the new society he projected. His formula therefore rejected the idea of paying for such goods of the earth as were not the product of human labor. Unlike later adherents to native anarchism, Warren continued to think land a fit subject for sale, an obvious inconsistency. On other matters, which he occasionally referred to as “spontaneous fruits of nature,” the raw materials derived from labor on the land, he held that such were no more fit subjects for monopoly and sale than sunshine or air.
• 182As regards compensation, Warren saw nothing fundamentally wrong with the original Owenite proposal to exchange labor time on an equal hour-for-hour basis. One of the perennial stumbling blocks to the realization of the labor cost theory, the problem of determining the relative intensities and production of the hour’s work being exchanged, did bother him somewhat. But he assumed that the principle of individual sovereignty being preserved at all times, each individual would make what he considered the necessary exceptions to the hour-for-hour yardstick without causing any noticeable disaffection among those involved in the labor exchange group.
• 183Josiah Warren was no aimless manipulator of theories. All his life he manifested a tireless interest in proof through demonstration. Scarcely had the reluctant admission of failure in Indiana appeared in the New Harmony Gazette in May 1827, when Warren gathered his family, his scant goods and savings together and returned to Cincinnati, anxious to try out his economic scheme in an actual social situation. He decided that the best means of effecting proof of the workability of his views was through the operation of a retail store, observing that such a trial was bound to affect a wide variety of persons, and its operations would thus become a type of laboratory exhibit.
• 184The venture was carefully planned. Warren had no intention of continuing in the capacity of storekeeper if what he thought proved to be successful. His intention was to close the store abruptly and begin a model village at once on the outskirts of Cincinnati. The residents he hoped to recruit from among the more enthusiastic of the group of co-operators. This was to be done as quietly as possible, publicity being kept to a bare minimum. His strategy involved the practical demonstration of every element of non-coercive equity on the autonomous local community level in such a manner as to leave no doubt as to their value and practicability. Following the explanation of the manner in which the process had been accomplished, Warren believed that a rapid growth of mutualist villages would take place. Like Robert Owen, he anticipated great things for the betterment of mankind, although the structure he contemplated was far less complex.
• 185Thus the anarchist vision of a world composed of autonomous local communities, in which individuality would be one sacred principle and economic life regulated by the mutual exchange of goods and services on a cost basis, found its expression on the trans-Allegheny frontier two decades before similar European conceptions made their appearance. Furthermore, while the present-day modified coöperative movement looks to Rochdale, England and the earlier London Labor Exchanges, the first venture in coöperative marketing had an uncontestably American setting, predating either of these more widely known English events and in some respects providing the inspiration for them.
• 186The original stock of the store consisted of three hundred dollars’ worth of groceries and dry goods which were in greatest demand. Warren posted the bills of purchase within view of all potential customers, that all might see what had originally been paid for the goods on sale. Accompanying them was a notice stating that the cost price would be charged plus a seven per cent mark-up to pay what he called “contingent expenses.” This constituted the first part of the transaction. He made it plain that no element of the cash price consisted of his profit or return as storekeeper. The customer was first to pay this cost price, plus the seven per cent, which was to defray shipping cost and general overhead of the store. But for the portion which represented his own labor, Warren merely required the customer to present him with a labor note. This note promised to repay an equal amount of time, in the customer’s occupation, to the storekeeper, as he had consumed of the storekeeper’s time in effecting the transfer of the merchandise. The principal distinction between Warren’s store and those of his neighbors was this simple feature, the separation of the merchant’s compensation from the cost of the goods sold.
• 187The original stock of the store consisted of three hundred dollars’ worth of groceries and dry goods which were in greatest demand. Warren posted the bills of purchase within view of all potential customers, that all might see what had originally been paid for the goods on sale. Accompanying them was a notice stating that the cost price would be charged plus a seven per cent mark-up to pay what he called “contingent expenses.” This constituted the first part of the transaction. He made it plain that no element of the cash price consisted of his profit or return as storekeeper. The customer was first to pay this cost price, plus the seven per cent, which was to defray shipping cost and general overhead of the store. But for the portion which represented his own labor, Warren merely required the customer to present him with a labor note. This note promised to repay an equal amount of time, in the customer’s occupation, to the storekeeper, as he had consumed of the storekeeper’s time in effecting the transfer of the merchandise. The principal distinction between Warren’s store and those of his neighbors was this simple feature, the separation of the merchant’s compensation from the cost of the goods sold.
• 188The original stock of the store consisted of three hundred dollars’ worth of groceries and dry goods which were in greatest demand. Warren posted the bills of purchase within view of all potential customers, that all might see what had originally been paid for the goods on sale. Accompanying them was a notice stating that the cost price would be charged plus a seven per cent mark-up to pay what he called “contingent expenses.” This constituted the first part of the transaction. He made it plain that no element of the cash price consisted of his profit or return as storekeeper. The customer was first to pay this cost price, plus the seven per cent, which was to defray shipping cost and general overhead of the store. But for the portion which represented his own labor, Warren merely required the customer to present him with a labor note. This note promised to repay an equal amount of time, in the customer’s occupation, to the storekeeper, as he had consumed of the storekeeper’s time in effecting the transfer of the merchandise. The principal distinction between Warren’s store and those of his neighbors was this simple feature, the separation of the merchant’s compensation from the cost of the goods sold.
• 189Often asked by people who failed to understand what he was trying to do, why he did not charge a blanket percentage to cover the entire matter of costs and profit, Warren patiently explained that failure to disconnect the two operations would destroy the principle he was trying to illustrate. No percentage could be accurately assigned to serve either the seller’s or the buyer’s interest; no particular relation existed between the profit and the labor expended in production of the article vended. Thus for instance twenty percent profit on needles would soon result in the storekeeper’s ruination, while the same percentage on broadcloth would net him a return of probably two dollars for a scant ten minutes work, obviously inequitable. A storekeeper, he went on, might buy and sell one barrel or a hundred barrels of flour in the same time; thus the correct basis upon which he should be paid was solely the amount of time expended in conducting the transaction.
• 190Warren was convinced that nothing was superior to the direct exchange of commodities and services; if agreement as to labor content existed, it was preferable to any system involving elements of confidence and risk, which he was convinced the use of currency necessarily provoked. Realizing that specialization and diversity of tastes made this only a partial solution to the continual problem of exchange, the adoption of the labor note paper bills served the function of completing all exchanges not available to settlement by direct exchange. There was a difference in the application of this device by Warren as compared to its original purpose as conceived by Owen. Where the latter had intended it as a means of effecting transactions among the different communities at New Harmony, the former reduced the scope to the local function of a limited currency, but valid among all those who engaged in any part of the business at the time store.
• 191The name “time store” was a popular designation, not an original appellation of Warren’s, and had come into general use by the end of the third month of the store’s existence. The circumstances responsible for this have aroused the interest and curiosity of several commentators, but Warren’s own explanation is the clearest.
• 192This was an innovation. It was to the interest of the customer to take up as little of the storekeeper’s time as possible, since time was one of the elements in the price settlement. Thus wrangling and higgling over prices, which Warren considered a particularly degrading feature of ordinary commerce, was eliminated in time store operations, a matter of considerable significance at a time when such functions were an almost fundamental part of merchandising. Transactions were expedited by the open display of goods and prominence of list prices, another unprecedented feature.
• 193It is interesting to note that before the store was terminated, Warren succeeded in reducing the commerce in such staples as flour, meal, beans, beef, pork and shoes to a modified labor exchange level. A set of actual labor prices based on an average estimate of the labor cost of production of each of these commodities evolved, which was posted in the store, and these changed from time to time as labor estimates fluctuated. The partial realization of an economy resting exclusively on exchange of labor notes thus took place independent of the use of legal currency.
• 194Warren’s unpretentious establishment opened its doors on May 18, 1827 and after a faltering start produced results which he found highly gratifying. The failure of New Harmony had become common knowledge in Cincinnati by the time Warren expressed his determination to begin his labor exchange store, and his friends begged him to refrain from additional attempts at reform. The promise of financial support in commencing a conventional business venture was of no avail. Nor was he inhibited by denunciations of his plan as “utopian” or “visionary,” or as just one more of the numerous tricks to aid speculating or swindling which were all too common in the port towns along the water route to New Orleans. Despite all the discouraging factors, the time store began operations, and at the end of three months had resulted in making an impression in the retail trade of the area which has since drawn the attention of students of early American economic radicalism.
• 195Warren’s methods of doing business were adopted by a neighboring merchant, while he declared that the new methods permitted him to sell as much merchandise in an hour as normally was retailed in a day. This increased activity forced him to close part of the day to rest and to furnish information as to how the labor exchange store functioned. There was a mixed reception to the new shop. Some, who considered the principles equitable, thought them a thing of the future. Others circulated rumors that Warren was an accomplice of big merchants, helping them dispose of their damaged and inferior stocks of goods. One opponent, still remembering New Harmony and the suspicion it had aroused among conservative folk, asserted that Warren was an agent of Robert Owen and had been commissioned to engage in a plot to undermine the United States. No one seemed to realize that Warren’s system was a direct blow at the money economy and the power that such a system had in determining the nature of production and the incidence of distribution. The time store founder was not to feel the full impact of a large-scale whispering campaign for some time in the future, not until the time of the founding of the much-discussed individualist colony on Long Island.
• 196Warren, in his anxiety to extend the labor exchange method in as many ways as possible, gave music lessons in the evenings to young men who understood the operation of the plan and agreed to enter as participants. He and a group of his mutual customers succeeded in securing a teacher for their children who also accepted compensation in labor notes. In 1829 he asserted that three physicians had already purchased goods on these same principles, promising professional services on demand. An agnostic, he took pleasure in telling at a later time of an influential Methodist convert to the time store principles who had interrupted an argument about a point of faith and charity with the following observation: “Well, brothers, people have been disputing for eighteen hundred years about what is true Christianity. Now, if you will go down to the corner of Fifth and Elm Streets, you will see it in operation for the first time in the world.”
• 197Warren, in his anxiety to extend the labor exchange method in as many ways as possible, gave music lessons in the evenings to young men who understood the operation of the plan and agreed to enter as participants. He and a group of his mutual customers succeeded in securing a teacher for their children who also accepted compensation in labor notes. In 1829 he asserted that three physicians had already purchased goods on these same principles, promising professional services on demand. An agnostic, he took pleasure in telling at a later time of an influential Methodist convert to the time store principles who had interrupted an argument about a point of faith and charity with the following observation: “Well, brothers, people have been disputing for eighteen hundred years about what is true Christianity. Now, if you will go down to the corner of Fifth and Elm Streets, you will see it in operation for the first time in the world.”
• 198Warren borrowed money to aid in the development of the store in its early days, but insisted on giving the lenders notes which were payable on demand. He never explained whether such payments had ever been requested or whether he had ever agreed to pay interest, or how immediate payment was possible if the sum obtained through loan had been invested in fixed capital by the time demand for its return had been made. There is no doubt, however, that he received the necessary backing, in view of the prolonged period of operations.
• 199Warren was opposed to enlarging the scope of his activities. He stressed continually that he was not attempting to put retail storekeepers out of business but trying to demonstrate principles of mutualism. He did double the capacity of the original store before the end of the first year, employing the labor of seven carpenters on the familiar exchange procedure; still he insisted on keeping the business on the same simple relationship between keeper and customer and never expanded to the extent of hiring clerks. This action would have been in the nature of a partnership under his conception of the plan, and such combination of interests was diametrically opposed to the principle of individuality which he unequivocally professed.
• 200The introduction of still another aspect of labor exchange opened his eyes to other inequalities in the economic system which he believed called for reparation. This was what he called the “report of demand.” A large sheet of paper was posted on one wall of the store on which those with particular needs made them known, and those with labor and services available for exchange stated the nature of their particular ability or capacity. At the same time he posted a list of commodities for which he would exchange the same, in an attempt to produce a “leveling” of supply. Warren’s conception of the terms “supply” and “demand” had little relation to their use in economic terminology of the present day. In his simple system, the declared desire to have a given object constituted “demand” for it, and no relation whatever to the possession of ability to pay on the basis of theoretical graduated price curves, in a money economy. He was convinced that existing economic relationships were exactly reversed in operation, to that demanded by distributive justice. The only way to bring about equity was to adapt supply to what he called “demand,” and thus eliminate the occasion for speculation in human need.
• 201The great number of requests for employment in unwanted occupations distressed him considerably, as did the observation that the labor return of children and women was artificially depressed below the level existing among adult men engaged in similar activities. This led to an investigation and condemnation of the apprentice system, which he called an “obsolete barbarity,” a deliberate and artificial restriction of employment which curtailed demand for many services and products. Thus began a full-scale campaign to spread information about all types of skills, a matter of vital concern at a time previous to the widespread adoption of automatic machinery. Warren reasoned that the cost-basis economy required the production of all goods at the lowest possible labor cost. This could only be accomplished by the employment of each in the activity he could do best, and therefore cheapest, from the point of view of labor time involved. It was at this time also that he observed another harrassing element in the labor exchange operation. This was the problem of determining intensity of relative hours of labor, further complicated by the fact that the most repulsive types of labor were generally the poorest paid. This matter he wrestled with for the remainder of his life, and was never able to satisfy himself as to the best method of solution.
• 202Warren’s activities in marketing spread over a wide range. He sold almost any product or article which he thought would demonstrate his theory. In all transactions, he attempted a drastic underselling of his competitors to provide the greatest possible contrast between the profit system and the coöperative system. This occasionally involved practices which were not strictly in accordance with equity, such as purchases in wholesale lots, often at public auctions. Such were sacrifices and not exchanges of equivalents. He justified this action by asserting that other retailers bought as much as he, but failed to pass on the saving to their patrons.
• 203Warren’s activities in marketing spread over a wide range. He sold almost any product or article which he thought would demonstrate his theory. In all transactions, he attempted a drastic underselling of his competitors to provide the greatest possible contrast between the profit system and the coöperative system. This occasionally involved practices which were not strictly in accordance with equity, such as purchases in wholesale lots, often at public auctions. Such were sacrifices and not exchanges of equivalents. He justified this action by asserting that other retailers bought as much as he, but failed to pass on the saving to their patrons.
• 204The Cincinnati Time Store was finally liquidated in May, 1830. Warren had long been satisfied that his plan was sound and that he had succeeded in regulating his business by principles without utilizing what he called “the customary machinery of organization,” or the “erection of any power over the individual.” In fact, he thought that this had been proven in the first six months. The original intent to start communities based on such principles he found more difficult to promote than expected. As early as November, 1827, he had contemplated beginning on a holding of 1500 acres of land in Logan County, Ohio, which had been offered for the purpose by an enthusiast named Samuel Hyde Saunders. Nothing was done at this time, nor even a year later when he considered moving outside the city and forming a model village.
• 205The Cincinnati Time Store was finally liquidated in May, 1830. Warren had long been satisfied that his plan was sound and that he had succeeded in regulating his business by principles without utilizing what he called “the customary machinery of organization,” or the “erection of any power over the individual.” In fact, he thought that this had been proven in the first six months. The original intent to start communities based on such principles he found more difficult to promote than expected. As early as November, 1827, he had contemplated beginning on a holding of 1500 acres of land in Logan County, Ohio, which had been offered for the purpose by an enthusiast named Samuel Hyde Saunders. Nothing was done at this time, nor even a year later when he considered moving outside the city and forming a model village.
• 206The Cincinnati Time Store was finally liquidated in May, 1830. Warren had long been satisfied that his plan was sound and that he had succeeded in regulating his business by principles without utilizing what he called “the customary machinery of organization,” or the “erection of any power over the individual.” In fact, he thought that this had been proven in the first six months. The original intent to start communities based on such principles he found more difficult to promote than expected. As early as November, 1827, he had contemplated beginning on a holding of 1500 acres of land in Logan County, Ohio, which had been offered for the purpose by an enthusiast named Samuel Hyde Saunders. Nothing was done at this time, nor even a year later when he considered moving outside the city and forming a model village.
• 207A third and final decision to begin a village was made in April, 1829. Despite the hundreds of customers who had made purchases in the time store, all involving the acceptance and utility of labor notes, Warren ruefully recalled that only four people were ready to take part in this adventure. Warren learned, as had Owen before him, that the inertia of the status quo was a formidable antagonist to such a sweeping reorganization of human affairs as he entertained. He was too practical to think that such a plan as he proposed could succeed if supported only by the poor, the needy, and others at the bottom of the economic ladder, even though it was one of the principal reasons for starting in the first place, to eliminate the perpetuation of this by-product of what he called “legalized cannibalism.” He remarked that hundreds were interested in his proposition who were too poor to afford the loss of the month’s income which removing and changing positions would occasion. Others had different objections. Some feared inability to obtain employment under the new conditions. Others did not look favorably upon the equitable compensation of women and children or the proposal to teach the secrets of carefully guarded trades in a few days or weeks. Those with means admitted in private conversations the worth of some of his proposals yet abstained entirely from offering assistance.
• 208A third and final decision to begin a village was made in April, 1829. Despite the hundreds of customers who had made purchases in the time store, all involving the acceptance and utility of labor notes, Warren ruefully recalled that only four people were ready to take part in this adventure. Warren learned, as had Owen before him, that the inertia of the status quo was a formidable antagonist to such a sweeping reorganization of human affairs as he entertained. He was too practical to think that such a plan as he proposed could succeed if supported only by the poor, the needy, and others at the bottom of the economic ladder, even though it was one of the principal reasons for starting in the first place, to eliminate the perpetuation of this by-product of what he called “legalized cannibalism.” He remarked that hundreds were interested in his proposition who were too poor to afford the loss of the month’s income which removing and changing positions would occasion. Others had different objections. Some feared inability to obtain employment under the new conditions. Others did not look favorably upon the equitable compensation of women and children or the proposal to teach the secrets of carefully guarded trades in a few days or weeks. Those with means admitted in private conversations the worth of some of his proposals yet abstained entirely from offering assistance.
• 209Warren felt at the time that those who participated in his time store still lacked the capacity to understand the nature of the proposals the way he had explained them. Many years later, however, he became convinced that, looking back on the wreckage of several community attempts, failure had been due more to the planned efforts of an element among the business community, which he claimed had everywhere created difficulties and placed obstacles in the way of success of his non-profit community projection. In spite of the mounting gloom occasioned by the unresponsiveness of his former coöperators to the call to form a village, the plan was persevered in, and the land was selected upon which to move, in the spring of 1829.
• 210Warren felt at the time that those who participated in his time store still lacked the capacity to understand the nature of the proposals the way he had explained them. Many years later, however, he became convinced that, looking back on the wreckage of several community attempts, failure had been due more to the planned efforts of an element among the business community, which he claimed had everywhere created difficulties and placed obstacles in the way of success of his non-profit community projection. In spite of the mounting gloom occasioned by the unresponsiveness of his former coöperators to the call to form a village, the plan was persevered in, and the land was selected upon which to move, in the spring of 1829.
• 211Warren felt at the time that those who participated in his time store still lacked the capacity to understand the nature of the proposals the way he had explained them. Many years later, however, he became convinced that, looking back on the wreckage of several community attempts, failure had been due more to the planned efforts of an element among the business community, which he claimed had everywhere created difficulties and placed obstacles in the way of success of his non-profit community projection. In spite of the mounting gloom occasioned by the unresponsiveness of his former coöperators to the call to form a village, the plan was persevered in, and the land was selected upon which to move, in the spring of 1829.
• 212At this point the strange interlude of Warren’s relations with Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright occurred. Owen, the gifted son of the New Harmony patron, and the brilliant Scotswoman, champion of a dozen unpopular causes ranging from Negro equality to anti-clericalism, had moved the center of operations of the intellectual radical movement associated with New Harmony from Indiana to New York City. There they had renewed publication of the celebrated community newsorgan, The New Harmony Gazette, under the name The Free Enquirer, devoting most of the space now to the propagation of the general sentiments of freethought, with generous portions of acrimonious controversy with adherents of various brands of orthodoxy as a special feature. Althought more concerned with their protracted joust with biblical fundamentalists, and in particular, the wave of emotional revivalism then sweeping through some elements of Protestantism, the two young liberals retained a sympathetic interest in all attempts at community organization. This was understandable, since most of this activity during this period was primarily a backwash of the parent essay at New Harmony.
• 213At this point the strange interlude of Warren’s relations with Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright occurred. Owen, the gifted son of the New Harmony patron, and the brilliant Scotswoman, champion of a dozen unpopular causes ranging from Negro equality to anti-clericalism, had moved the center of operations of the intellectual radical movement associated with New Harmony from Indiana to New York City. There they had renewed publication of the celebrated community newsorgan, The New Harmony Gazette, under the name The Free Enquirer, devoting most of the space now to the propagation of the general sentiments of freethought, with generous portions of acrimonious controversy with adherents of various brands of orthodoxy as a special feature. Althought more concerned with their protracted joust with biblical fundamentalists, and in particular, the wave of emotional revivalism then sweeping through some elements of Protestantism, the two young liberals retained a sympathetic interest in all attempts at community organization. This was understandable, since most of this activity during this period was primarily a backwash of the parent essay at New Harmony.
• 214At this point the strange interlude of Warren’s relations with Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright occurred. Owen, the gifted son of the New Harmony patron, and the brilliant Scotswoman, champion of a dozen unpopular causes ranging from Negro equality to anti-clericalism, had moved the center of operations of the intellectual radical movement associated with New Harmony from Indiana to New York City. There they had renewed publication of the celebrated community newsorgan, The New Harmony Gazette, under the name The Free Enquirer, devoting most of the space now to the propagation of the general sentiments of freethought, with generous portions of acrimonious controversy with adherents of various brands of orthodoxy as a special feature. Althought more concerned with their protracted joust with biblical fundamentalists, and in particular, the wave of emotional revivalism then sweeping through some elements of Protestantism, the two young liberals retained a sympathetic interest in all attempts at community organization. This was understandable, since most of this activity during this period was primarily a backwash of the parent essay at New Harmony.
• 215The Ohio activities of Josiah Warren had attracted the attention of the land and labor reform press of New York City, where slums were already a problem, and depressed segments of the population a feature of the urban social structure. It is not unusual, then, to find the editors of The Free Enquirer becoming concerned to the point of proposing collaboration in achieving the aims of Warren’s non-political scheme for alleviating the evidences of economic distress which had come to his attention during the few years of his reform career.
• 216Owen prevailed upon Warren to postpone the beginning of his community in Ohio in favor of a similar beginning in the vicinity of New York. This was made to appear extremely attractive through the promise of considerable financial and material support already at the former’s bidding. Owen, as had his father, had in mind a much larger unit than Warren. This was apparently to be publicized through a press campaign, intending no doubt to include the pages of the Free Enquirer, in a broad program of propaganda to advertise its potential advantages. Dazzled by this offer, Warren abandoned the proposed movement to the outskirts of Cincinnati, and thus the decision came about to continue the time store into a third year.
• 217Owen’s existing business precluded the immediate start of the New York village, and what was intended to be a temprary lull dragged on. Thus the time store celebrated a third anniversary before Warren liquidated the remaining stock and began the momentous journey to New York, anticipating memorable results. But still another delay intervened; Owen was called to Europe and the plans languished. Yet there still remained a strong spirit of affirmation of the previous support of Warren on his part and that of Fanny Wright as well. The Free Enquirer continued to express confidence in the eventual success of a Warrenite colony, and Warren himself was still hopeful, but the summer found him somewhat subdued. In mid-July he addressed a communication to his Cincinnati associates, confessing that nothing tangible had been accomplished, but asserting that the call to begin practical operations would come at an early date.
• 218Owen’s existing business precluded the immediate start of the New York village, and what was intended to be a temprary lull dragged on. Thus the time store celebrated a third anniversary before Warren liquidated the remaining stock and began the momentous journey to New York, anticipating memorable results. But still another delay intervened; Owen was called to Europe and the plans languished. Yet there still remained a strong spirit of affirmation of the previous support of Warren on his part and that of Fanny Wright as well. The Free Enquirer continued to express confidence in the eventual success of a Warrenite colony, and Warren himself was still hopeful, but the summer found him somewhat subdued. In mid-July he addressed a communication to his Cincinnati associates, confessing that nothing tangible had been accomplished, but asserting that the call to begin practical operations would come at an early date.
• 219Owen’s existing business precluded the immediate start of the New York village, and what was intended to be a temprary lull dragged on. Thus the time store celebrated a third anniversary before Warren liquidated the remaining stock and began the momentous journey to New York, anticipating memorable results. But still another delay intervened; Owen was called to Europe and the plans languished. Yet there still remained a strong spirit of affirmation of the previous support of Warren on his part and that of Fanny Wright as well. The Free Enquirer continued to express confidence in the eventual success of a Warrenite colony, and Warren himself was still hopeful, but the summer found him somewhat subdued. In mid-July he addressed a communication to his Cincinnati associates, confessing that nothing tangible had been accomplished, but asserting that the call to begin practical operations would come at an early date.
• 220Turning from presses to type faces, he brought out two small volumes in 1844 which made use of a revived interest in an early eighteenth century stereotyping process. This involved the substitution of a composition of unusual hardness in the place of metal, which reduced printing costs markedly and furthered the contest with publishers in general. These pioneer booklets, which sought to revolutionize the system of musical notation and thereby enable aspiring musicians to reduce the expense and duration of training, met no better fate than any of his other earlier accomplishments, other than to further the development of what he later designated as “Universal Typography.”
• 221Turning from presses to type faces, he brought out two small volumes in 1844 which made use of a revived interest in an early eighteenth century stereotyping process. This involved the substitution of a composition of unusual hardness in the place of metal, which reduced printing costs markedly and furthered the contest with publishers in general. These pioneer booklets, which sought to revolutionize the system of musical notation and thereby enable aspiring musicians to reduce the expense and duration of training, met no better fate than any of his other earlier accomplishments, other than to further the development of what he later designated as “Universal Typography.”
• 222Turning from presses to type faces, he brought out two small volumes in 1844 which made use of a revived interest in an early eighteenth century stereotyping process. This involved the substitution of a composition of unusual hardness in the place of metal, which reduced printing costs markedly and furthered the contest with publishers in general. These pioneer booklets, which sought to revolutionize the system of musical notation and thereby enable aspiring musicians to reduce the expense and duration of training, met no better fate than any of his other earlier accomplishments, other than to further the development of what he later designated as “Universal Typography.”
• 223Warren compromised his principles in respect to previous unyielding theoretical opposition to patents. At the urging of Owen’s sons and his old friend, the midwestern scientific agricultural pioneer Solon Robinson, the process was patented in the spring of 1845. Robinson not only brought the documents to the Patent Office at this time, but acted as agent for Warren. While travelling through the Midwest, he publicized its merits, which were recognized by editors with whom he came in contact all along the Ohio. The inventor himself illustrated his ability as an engraver with numerous examples of his artistry, several of which embellished the heretofore stark pages of New Harmony’s weekly journal.
• 224Warren compromised his principles in respect to previous unyielding theoretical opposition to patents. At the urging of Owen’s sons and his old friend, the midwestern scientific agricultural pioneer Solon Robinson, the process was patented in the spring of 1845. Robinson not only brought the documents to the Patent Office at this time, but acted as agent for Warren. While travelling through the Midwest, he publicized its merits, which were recognized by editors with whom he came in contact all along the Ohio. The inventor himself illustrated his ability as an engraver with numerous examples of his artistry, several of which embellished the heretofore stark pages of New Harmony’s weekly journal.
• 225Warren compromised his principles in respect to previous unyielding theoretical opposition to patents. At the urging of Owen’s sons and his old friend, the midwestern scientific agricultural pioneer Solon Robinson, the process was patented in the spring of 1845. Robinson not only brought the documents to the Patent Office at this time, but acted as agent for Warren. While travelling through the Midwest, he publicized its merits, which were recognized by editors with whom he came in contact all along the Ohio. The inventor himself illustrated his ability as an engraver with numerous examples of his artistry, several of which embellished the heretofore stark pages of New Harmony’s weekly journal.
• 226Regardless of patent protection and the attendant publicity, no attempt was made to plumb the commercial possibilities of the composition cast method of stereotyping. To Warren it meant more as an opportunity to expand his own printing activities, especially in broadcasting the message of equitable commerce. Since he had contemplated for some time publishing a comprehensive summary of his philosophy and explorations in social matters, it now was possible to fulfill these aspirations with a minimum of expense. Despite the interruptions caused by the handicaps of working without help in an endeavor where the benefits of division of labor were obvious, the work persevered. The difficulties were not all mechanical; Warren was not a literary man, and wrote painfully, in a simple but often stilted style, which was further burdened by a somewhat archaic vocabulary, even in the estimate of his contemporaries. The final product of two years of collation and revision of a mass of notes taken sporadically for almost twenty years, all its imperfections considered, was a document of undeniable simplicity. Published in April, 1847, Josiah Warren’s Equitable Commerce became the first important publication of anarchist doctrine in America, and with minor deletions, additions and revisions, went into more editions within the next thirty years than any other product of native anarchist thought to this time.
• 227Regardless of patent protection and the attendant publicity, no attempt was made to plumb the commercial possibilities of the composition cast method of stereotyping. To Warren it meant more as an opportunity to expand his own printing activities, especially in broadcasting the message of equitable commerce. Since he had contemplated for some time publishing a comprehensive summary of his philosophy and explorations in social matters, it now was possible to fulfill these aspirations with a minimum of expense. Despite the interruptions caused by the handicaps of working without help in an endeavor where the benefits of division of labor were obvious, the work persevered. The difficulties were not all mechanical; Warren was not a literary man, and wrote painfully, in a simple but often stilted style, which was further burdened by a somewhat archaic vocabulary, even in the estimate of his contemporaries. The final product of two years of collation and revision of a mass of notes taken sporadically for almost twenty years, all its imperfections considered, was a document of undeniable simplicity. Published in April, 1847, Josiah Warren’s Equitable Commerce became the first important publication of anarchist doctrine in America, and with minor deletions, additions and revisions, went into more editions within the next thirty years than any other product of native anarchist thought to this time.
• 228Regardless of patent protection and the attendant publicity, no attempt was made to plumb the commercial possibilities of the composition cast method of stereotyping. To Warren it meant more as an opportunity to expand his own printing activities, especially in broadcasting the message of equitable commerce. Since he had contemplated for some time publishing a comprehensive summary of his philosophy and explorations in social matters, it now was possible to fulfill these aspirations with a minimum of expense. Despite the interruptions caused by the handicaps of working without help in an endeavor where the benefits of division of labor were obvious, the work persevered. The difficulties were not all mechanical; Warren was not a literary man, and wrote painfully, in a simple but often stilted style, which was further burdened by a somewhat archaic vocabulary, even in the estimate of his contemporaries. The final product of two years of collation and revision of a mass of notes taken sporadically for almost twenty years, all its imperfections considered, was a document of undeniable simplicity. Published in April, 1847, Josiah Warren’s Equitable Commerce became the first important publication of anarchist doctrine in America, and with minor deletions, additions and revisions, went into more editions within the next thirty years than any other product of native anarchist thought to this time.
• 229Equitable Commerce as an expression of social discontent catches much of the flavor of the world-wide revolt sentiment of the mid-nineteenth century. In an apocalyptic discourse reminiscent of, but anticipating Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Warren also looked out upon a civilization approaching a revolutionary crisis, but with the battle lines being drawn on a broad parasite-producer rather than the more limited capitalist-industrial worker line:
• 230The Warrenite program, however, discarded familiar reform interpretations and solutions, all varieties of collectivism, paternalism, violent revolutionary and political action. Elaborating on some of the ideas already expressed in other writings and further confirmed by experience and convictions produced thereby, he launched a delineation of the individualist stand on the proper reward of labor, security of personal property and freedom of the individual. Summed up in the two slogans “Sovereignty of the Individual” and “Cost the Limit of Price,” Equitable Commerce concentrated on preparing a case for this kind of individualism. The belief in the absolute inviolability of the individual personality expressed in its pages placed him in a camp opposite from the advocates of reform through legislation or violence.
• 231In Warren’s estimation, liberty and security were complementary, not opposites; liberty was the foundation upon which security of both person and property rested, and as long as there was one insecure person, there was potential insecurity for all others. This called for location in proper relation of power, which for each individual extended over his own person and property, and not beyond. This was expected to result in the undermining of the structure of all authority obtained from any other source than that of voluntary grant. To admit boundless individuality in nature and then to create institutions requiring agreement contrary to one’s will appeared the height of contradiction. Personal differences were an inseparable part of the individual personality, which he refused to see by-passed in the “pursuit of policy and expediency.” On this basis he rejected institutional activity which ultimately depended upon compliance on the part of the members unable to see it conducive to their best interests to do so, or which compromised them by demanding conformity as the price for favors allegedly furnished.
• 232In Warren’s estimation, liberty and security were complementary, not opposites; liberty was the foundation upon which security of both person and property rested, and as long as there was one insecure person, there was potential insecurity for all others. This called for location in proper relation of power, which for each individual extended over his own person and property, and not beyond. This was expected to result in the undermining of the structure of all authority obtained from any other source than that of voluntary grant. To admit boundless individuality in nature and then to create institutions requiring agreement contrary to one’s will appeared the height of contradiction. Personal differences were an inseparable part of the individual personality, which he refused to see by-passed in the “pursuit of policy and expediency.” On this basis he rejected institutional activity which ultimately depended upon compliance on the part of the members unable to see it conducive to their best interests to do so, or which compromised them by demanding conformity as the price for favors allegedly furnished.
• 233In Warren’s estimation, liberty and security were complementary, not opposites; liberty was the foundation upon which security of both person and property rested, and as long as there was one insecure person, there was potential insecurity for all others. This called for location in proper relation of power, which for each individual extended over his own person and property, and not beyond. This was expected to result in the undermining of the structure of all authority obtained from any other source than that of voluntary grant. To admit boundless individuality in nature and then to create institutions requiring agreement contrary to one’s will appeared the height of contradiction. Personal differences were an inseparable part of the individual personality, which he refused to see by-passed in the “pursuit of policy and expediency.” On this basis he rejected institutional activity which ultimately depended upon compliance on the part of the members unable to see it conducive to their best interests to do so, or which compromised them by demanding conformity as the price for favors allegedly furnished.
• 234In Warren’s estimation, liberty and security were complementary, not opposites; liberty was the foundation upon which security of both person and property rested, and as long as there was one insecure person, there was potential insecurity for all others. This called for location in proper relation of power, which for each individual extended over his own person and property, and not beyond. This was expected to result in the undermining of the structure of all authority obtained from any other source than that of voluntary grant. To admit boundless individuality in nature and then to create institutions requiring agreement contrary to one’s will appeared the height of contradiction. Personal differences were an inseparable part of the individual personality, which he refused to see by-passed in the “pursuit of policy and expediency.” On this basis he rejected institutional activity which ultimately depended upon compliance on the part of the members unable to see it conducive to their best interests to do so, or which compromised them by demanding conformity as the price for favors allegedly furnished.
• 235In the vein of his earlier writings on law, Warren continued to castigate legislation as one aspect of this denial of individual freedom. He objected particularly to the demand of unconditional fealty from all, enthusiastic or hesitant, to the wishes of the larger number. Warren saw no virtue in majorities; to him right was not a quantitative matter to be determined by sheer numbers. Should a thing be an evil when espoused by a few, the support of a larger number at a later time did not automatically change its nature, making what had been reprehensible now respectable and desirable. He refused to consider the manipulation of verbal symbols “laws” in the same sense:
• 236In the vein of his earlier writings on law, Warren continued to castigate legislation as one aspect of this denial of individual freedom. He objected particularly to the demand of unconditional fealty from all, enthusiastic or hesitant, to the wishes of the larger number. Warren saw no virtue in majorities; to him right was not a quantitative matter to be determined by sheer numbers. Should a thing be an evil when espoused by a few, the support of a larger number at a later time did not automatically change its nature, making what had been reprehensible now respectable and desirable. He refused to consider the manipulation of verbal symbols “laws” in the same sense:
• 237In the vein of his earlier writings on law, Warren continued to castigate legislation as one aspect of this denial of individual freedom. He objected particularly to the demand of unconditional fealty from all, enthusiastic or hesitant, to the wishes of the larger number. Warren saw no virtue in majorities; to him right was not a quantitative matter to be determined by sheer numbers. Should a thing be an evil when espoused by a few, the support of a larger number at a later time did not automatically change its nature, making what had been reprehensible now respectable and desirable. He refused to consider the manipulation of verbal symbols “laws” in the same sense:
• 238Warren thus attached to law, by virtue of its perpetual uncertainty, the blame for the great majority of crimes. Statute law could hardly be expected to do anything except aggravate and expand the diseases of society over a larger area. Warren scorned the explanation of laws and government by political theorists who sought to relate them to reality as manifestations of a common desire for the protection of life and possessions. He refused to believe that human history revealed such realization, and was convinced that the state had failed in its basic mission in providing protection for its citizens. What was worse, in his mind, was the effect of the governing process, which had been precipitated into a struggle for control of the governing privilege. This was the result, he explained, of the discovery that in an environment characterized by insecurity, the least insecure were the persons who were successful in obtaining control of the governing power. Thus rulers and ruling groups, protected temporarily by virtue of holding power, punished crimes by death and imprisonment without realizing that these were consequences of their own acts. The increasing complexity of laws and lawmaking succeeded in increasing the volume of violations rather than producing the security of the society which they purported to represent. On still another level, there was the spectacle of a government involving its citizens in group responsibilities from which many may have preferred to remain apart, and in extreme situations, such as wars, compelling them to desert their own interests and even die without recourse of any sort.
• 239Warren thus attached to law, by virtue of its perpetual uncertainty, the blame for the great majority of crimes. Statute law could hardly be expected to do anything except aggravate and expand the diseases of society over a larger area. Warren scorned the explanation of laws and government by political theorists who sought to relate them to reality as manifestations of a common desire for the protection of life and possessions. He refused to believe that human history revealed such realization, and was convinced that the state had failed in its basic mission in providing protection for its citizens. What was worse, in his mind, was the effect of the governing process, which had been precipitated into a struggle for control of the governing privilege. This was the result, he explained, of the discovery that in an environment characterized by insecurity, the least insecure were the persons who were successful in obtaining control of the governing power. Thus rulers and ruling groups, protected temporarily by virtue of holding power, punished crimes by death and imprisonment without realizing that these were consequences of their own acts. The increasing complexity of laws and lawmaking succeeded in increasing the volume of violations rather than producing the security of the society which they purported to represent. On still another level, there was the spectacle of a government involving its citizens in group responsibilities from which many may have preferred to remain apart, and in extreme situations, such as wars, compelling them to desert their own interests and even die without recourse of any sort.
• 240Warren thus attached to law, by virtue of its perpetual uncertainty, the blame for the great majority of crimes. Statute law could hardly be expected to do anything except aggravate and expand the diseases of society over a larger area. Warren scorned the explanation of laws and government by political theorists who sought to relate them to reality as manifestations of a common desire for the protection of life and possessions. He refused to believe that human history revealed such realization, and was convinced that the state had failed in its basic mission in providing protection for its citizens. What was worse, in his mind, was the effect of the governing process, which had been precipitated into a struggle for control of the governing privilege. This was the result, he explained, of the discovery that in an environment characterized by insecurity, the least insecure were the persons who were successful in obtaining control of the governing power. Thus rulers and ruling groups, protected temporarily by virtue of holding power, punished crimes by death and imprisonment without realizing that these were consequences of their own acts. The increasing complexity of laws and lawmaking succeeded in increasing the volume of violations rather than producing the security of the society which they purported to represent. On still another level, there was the spectacle of a government involving its citizens in group responsibilities from which many may have preferred to remain apart, and in extreme situations, such as wars, compelling them to desert their own interests and even die without recourse of any sort.
• 241Warren thus attached to law, by virtue of its perpetual uncertainty, the blame for the great majority of crimes. Statute law could hardly be expected to do anything except aggravate and expand the diseases of society over a larger area. Warren scorned the explanation of laws and government by political theorists who sought to relate them to reality as manifestations of a common desire for the protection of life and possessions. He refused to believe that human history revealed such realization, and was convinced that the state had failed in its basic mission in providing protection for its citizens. What was worse, in his mind, was the effect of the governing process, which had been precipitated into a struggle for control of the governing privilege. This was the result, he explained, of the discovery that in an environment characterized by insecurity, the least insecure were the persons who were successful in obtaining control of the governing power. Thus rulers and ruling groups, protected temporarily by virtue of holding power, punished crimes by death and imprisonment without realizing that these were consequences of their own acts. The increasing complexity of laws and lawmaking succeeded in increasing the volume of violations rather than producing the security of the society which they purported to represent. On still another level, there was the spectacle of a government involving its citizens in group responsibilities from which many may have preferred to remain apart, and in extreme situations, such as wars, compelling them to desert their own interests and even die without recourse of any sort.
• 242Warren thus attached to law, by virtue of its perpetual uncertainty, the blame for the great majority of crimes. Statute law could hardly be expected to do anything except aggravate and expand the diseases of society over a larger area. Warren scorned the explanation of laws and government by political theorists who sought to relate them to reality as manifestations of a common desire for the protection of life and possessions. He refused to believe that human history revealed such realization, and was convinced that the state had failed in its basic mission in providing protection for its citizens. What was worse, in his mind, was the effect of the governing process, which had been precipitated into a struggle for control of the governing privilege. This was the result, he explained, of the discovery that in an environment characterized by insecurity, the least insecure were the persons who were successful in obtaining control of the governing power. Thus rulers and ruling groups, protected temporarily by virtue of holding power, punished crimes by death and imprisonment without realizing that these were consequences of their own acts. The increasing complexity of laws and lawmaking succeeded in increasing the volume of violations rather than producing the security of the society which they purported to represent. On still another level, there was the spectacle of a government involving its citizens in group responsibilities from which many may have preferred to remain apart, and in extreme situations, such as wars, compelling them to desert their own interests and even die without recourse of any sort.
• 243Warren proposed a solution which dispensed with government other than that of each person over himself; “. . . never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time and property, each living and acting at his own cost; . . . The only ground upon which man can know liberty is that of disconnection, disunion, individuality.” American radical writing has few expressions which match the determination found in this piece of anti-statist literature, even though the complexity of human relationships in modern urban industrial society make its message of separation of interests sound of little use or pertinence. Other than this course, Warren predicted, would only increase conflicts and consequently would require more direction from the “outside,” more mediation, more intervention, which he termed “government.”
• 244Warren proposed a solution which dispensed with government other than that of each person over himself; “. . . never shall man know liberty until each and every individual is acknowledged to be the only legitimate sovereign of his or her person, time and property, each living and acting at his own cost; . . . The only ground upon which man can know liberty is that of disconnection, disunion, individuality.” American radical writing has few expressions which match the determination found in this piece of anti-statist literature, even though the complexity of human relationships in modern urban industrial society make its message of separation of interests sound of little use or pertinence. Other than this course, Warren predicted, would only increase conflicts and consequently would require more direction from the “outside,” more mediation, more intervention, which he termed “government.”
• 245The next part of the exposition of the ideal equitable society described the process whereby the aims of the individual and the needs of society were to be blended. The dog-eat-dog kind of “individualism” Warren saw all about him caused him considerable concern. His aim was to avoid the initiative-destroying propensities of the community of property, with which he was all too familiar. Keeping in mind physical and intellectual variables present among persons, he built up his version of an economy geared to a system of exchanges which used the labor cost of production as its sole guide. He proposed an economic structure consisting of producing members, acting either alone or in groups organized entirely on the principle of voluntary cooperation to make the most from the known advantages of division of labor. In all cases there was to be full individual responsibility, a condition to be arrived at by agreement where more than one person was involved. Only under such circumstances would it be possible for a group to live socially without the committal of powers of decision into the hands of an arbiter, judge, politician or other representative of outside agency claiming to operate in the interests of the group, in which he included the churches. No halfway process would be of any avail, because it was impossible to surrender a definite quantity of one’s liberty. Once erected, a government always tended to encroach upon what it did not control, due to its control over the interpretation of the language which delegated the powers it first obtained.
• 246The next part of the exposition of the ideal equitable society described the process whereby the aims of the individual and the needs of society were to be blended. The dog-eat-dog kind of “individualism” Warren saw all about him caused him considerable concern. His aim was to avoid the initiative-destroying propensities of the community of property, with which he was all too familiar. Keeping in mind physical and intellectual variables present among persons, he built up his version of an economy geared to a system of exchanges which used the labor cost of production as its sole guide. He proposed an economic structure consisting of producing members, acting either alone or in groups organized entirely on the principle of voluntary cooperation to make the most from the known advantages of division of labor. In all cases there was to be full individual responsibility, a condition to be arrived at by agreement where more than one person was involved. Only under such circumstances would it be possible for a group to live socially without the committal of powers of decision into the hands of an arbiter, judge, politician or other representative of outside agency claiming to operate in the interests of the group, in which he included the churches. No halfway process would be of any avail, because it was impossible to surrender a definite quantity of one’s liberty. Once erected, a government always tended to encroach upon what it did not control, due to its control over the interpretation of the language which delegated the powers it first obtained.
• 247The next part of the exposition of the ideal equitable society described the process whereby the aims of the individual and the needs of society were to be blended. The dog-eat-dog kind of “individualism” Warren saw all about him caused him considerable concern. His aim was to avoid the initiative-destroying propensities of the community of property, with which he was all too familiar. Keeping in mind physical and intellectual variables present among persons, he built up his version of an economy geared to a system of exchanges which used the labor cost of production as its sole guide. He proposed an economic structure consisting of producing members, acting either alone or in groups organized entirely on the principle of voluntary cooperation to make the most from the known advantages of division of labor. In all cases there was to be full individual responsibility, a condition to be arrived at by agreement where more than one person was involved. Only under such circumstances would it be possible for a group to live socially without the committal of powers of decision into the hands of an arbiter, judge, politician or other representative of outside agency claiming to operate in the interests of the group, in which he included the churches. No halfway process would be of any avail, because it was impossible to surrender a definite quantity of one’s liberty. Once erected, a government always tended to encroach upon what it did not control, due to its control over the interpretation of the language which delegated the powers it first obtained.
• 248The next part of the exposition of the ideal equitable society described the process whereby the aims of the individual and the needs of society were to be blended. The dog-eat-dog kind of “individualism” Warren saw all about him caused him considerable concern. His aim was to avoid the initiative-destroying propensities of the community of property, with which he was all too familiar. Keeping in mind physical and intellectual variables present among persons, he built up his version of an economy geared to a system of exchanges which used the labor cost of production as its sole guide. He proposed an economic structure consisting of producing members, acting either alone or in groups organized entirely on the principle of voluntary cooperation to make the most from the known advantages of division of labor. In all cases there was to be full individual responsibility, a condition to be arrived at by agreement where more than one person was involved. Only under such circumstances would it be possible for a group to live socially without the committal of powers of decision into the hands of an arbiter, judge, politician or other representative of outside agency claiming to operate in the interests of the group, in which he included the churches. No halfway process would be of any avail, because it was impossible to surrender a definite quantity of one’s liberty. Once erected, a government always tended to encroach upon what it did not control, due to its control over the interpretation of the language which delegated the powers it first obtained.
• 249The way of life which Warren sought to inaugurate according to Equitable Commerce incorporated a number of considerations which were bound to make the entire project unpalatable to most of the affluent and comfortable members of society among his readers, and to all those with ambitions of carving out for themselves a higher position in the existing order. The ultimate re-organization of society on the basis of decentralized local communities in which the needs and capabilities of all might be readily learned, was expected to lead to the circumvention of political boundaries and the placing of all inter-community relations on a voluntary level as well. It was assumed that community services would be supplied in a superior manner by individuals who contracted to furnish them when called for by those who wanted and paid for such conveniences. Warren mentioned nothing concerning the problem of inter-community transportation and communication. Furthermore, this system was predicated on the theory that there was an optimum community size, following the attainment of which it was expected that additional communities would develop nearby to the parent. In developing this matter, Warren appeared to be thinking in terms of the experiences of the last year at New Harmony during its Owenite phase, although Owen himself had stated before New Harmony the necessity of limiting the size of the community.
• 250The way of life which Warren sought to inaugurate according to Equitable Commerce incorporated a number of considerations which were bound to make the entire project unpalatable to most of the affluent and comfortable members of society among his readers, and to all those with ambitions of carving out for themselves a higher position in the existing order. The ultimate re-organization of society on the basis of decentralized local communities in which the needs and capabilities of all might be readily learned, was expected to lead to the circumvention of political boundaries and the placing of all inter-community relations on a voluntary level as well. It was assumed that community services would be supplied in a superior manner by individuals who contracted to furnish them when called for by those who wanted and paid for such conveniences. Warren mentioned nothing concerning the problem of inter-community transportation and communication. Furthermore, this system was predicated on the theory that there was an optimum community size, following the attainment of which it was expected that additional communities would develop nearby to the parent. In developing this matter, Warren appeared to be thinking in terms of the experiences of the last year at New Harmony during its Owenite phase, although Owen himself had stated before New Harmony the necessity of limiting the size of the community.
• 251The way of life which Warren sought to inaugurate according to Equitable Commerce incorporated a number of considerations which were bound to make the entire project unpalatable to most of the affluent and comfortable members of society among his readers, and to all those with ambitions of carving out for themselves a higher position in the existing order. The ultimate re-organization of society on the basis of decentralized local communities in which the needs and capabilities of all might be readily learned, was expected to lead to the circumvention of political boundaries and the placing of all inter-community relations on a voluntary level as well. It was assumed that community services would be supplied in a superior manner by individuals who contracted to furnish them when called for by those who wanted and paid for such conveniences. Warren mentioned nothing concerning the problem of inter-community transportation and communication. Furthermore, this system was predicated on the theory that there was an optimum community size, following the attainment of which it was expected that additional communities would develop nearby to the parent. In developing this matter, Warren appeared to be thinking in terms of the experiences of the last year at New Harmony during its Owenite phase, although Owen himself had stated before New Harmony the necessity of limiting the size of the community.
• 252The way of life which Warren sought to inaugurate according to Equitable Commerce incorporated a number of considerations which were bound to make the entire project unpalatable to most of the affluent and comfortable members of society among his readers, and to all those with ambitions of carving out for themselves a higher position in the existing order. The ultimate re-organization of society on the basis of decentralized local communities in which the needs and capabilities of all might be readily learned, was expected to lead to the circumvention of political boundaries and the placing of all inter-community relations on a voluntary level as well. It was assumed that community services would be supplied in a superior manner by individuals who contracted to furnish them when called for by those who wanted and paid for such conveniences. Warren mentioned nothing concerning the problem of inter-community transportation and communication. Furthermore, this system was predicated on the theory that there was an optimum community size, following the attainment of which it was expected that additional communities would develop nearby to the parent. In developing this matter, Warren appeared to be thinking in terms of the experiences of the last year at New Harmony during its Owenite phase, although Owen himself had stated before New Harmony the necessity of limiting the size of the community.
• 253One of the primary requirements of the self-sufficient society was his insistence on the decentralization of manufactures, to be confined to the production for satisfaction of local needs exclusively. Among other things, this was considered beneficial in order to fix responsibility for the utility and quality of the products, which were variables over which consumers in a profit economy far removed from the site of production had practically no control.
• 254With respect to machinery, the position taken in some ways anticipated Henry George. Warren did not look upon it as a separate factor of production, but merely a combination of the two he recognized, land, or raw materials, and the labor which went into its production. The combined labor of producing the materials incorporated in the machine, in addition to that needed to construct the machine itself equalled what he called the “cost” of the machine, and belonged to the laborers and inventors who conceived and built it. Machinery was a social benefaction only so long as it made products available priced to consumers in terms of cost of production. The displacement of labor resulting from the introduction of machinery might seek employment in other activities not yet fully mechanized, having benefited from the cheapened product now resulting from the technological innovation. Warren looked forward to a future work day of two or three hours through the abolition of craft monopolies and the social sharing of the benefits of machine production. He did not believe that needs were indefinitely expansible, and thought that if technical production was geared to needs, there would be none of the pernicious effects of speculative manufacture with its disastrous accompaniments of “over-production” and subsequent destruction for the purpose of preserving price levels.
• 255With respect to machinery, the position taken in some ways anticipated Henry George. Warren did not look upon it as a separate factor of production, but merely a combination of the two he recognized, land, or raw materials, and the labor which went into its production. The combined labor of producing the materials incorporated in the machine, in addition to that needed to construct the machine itself equalled what he called the “cost” of the machine, and belonged to the laborers and inventors who conceived and built it. Machinery was a social benefaction only so long as it made products available priced to consumers in terms of cost of production. The displacement of labor resulting from the introduction of machinery might seek employment in other activities not yet fully mechanized, having benefited from the cheapened product now resulting from the technological innovation. Warren looked forward to a future work day of two or three hours through the abolition of craft monopolies and the social sharing of the benefits of machine production. He did not believe that needs were indefinitely expansible, and thought that if technical production was geared to needs, there would be none of the pernicious effects of speculative manufacture with its disastrous accompaniments of “over-production” and subsequent destruction for the purpose of preserving price levels.
• 256Warren’s opposition to the private ownership of machinery on the basis of a patent monopoly or any other contingency except actual construction was no more resolute than his opposition to the acquisition of land for speculative purposes. While fifteen years before he had questioned land titles themselves, he now was willing to accept the prevailing division, providing all land sales subsequent to the original purchase involved no addition to what he called the “prime cost” beyond expenses resulting from surveying, drawing up of contracts, and even taxes, to which there was no expression of resistance, a remarkable concession.
• 257Warren’s opposition to the private ownership of machinery on the basis of a patent monopoly or any other contingency except actual construction was no more resolute than his opposition to the acquisition of land for speculative purposes. While fifteen years before he had questioned land titles themselves, he now was willing to accept the prevailing division, providing all land sales subsequent to the original purchase involved no addition to what he called the “prime cost” beyond expenses resulting from surveying, drawing up of contracts, and even taxes, to which there was no expression of resistance, a remarkable concession.
• 258Equitable Commerce contained the now-familiar exposition of the labor note currency, with variations resulting from discrepancies which previous trial now exposed. Warren sought to solve the problem caused by the refusal of some members in his previous labor exchange to participate in accepting similar amounts of any member’s time. This came as a result of his declaration that work of greatest repugnance was worthy of the highest remuneration, since distastefulness must be considered one of the elements of “cost” if anyone was to perform the unpleasant tasks in a non-coercive society. It was felt that the undermining of this principle destroyed the whole basis of the labor exchange plan. Another novelty in the statement of the labor notes bore on the issue created by persons with different evaluations of labor time. Although Warren had repudiated gold and silver and all other commodity-backed moneys as inferior to the direct matching of labor for labor, in Equitable Commerce he decided that there should be an alternative to the acceptance of the actual labor of the person presenting any given note. This resulted in the concession to back the labor currency with “Indian” corn, which was judged to be superior to metals with respect to ease of determining its cost of production in man hours. All subsequent labor notes bore guarantees of payment in a number of pounds of corn.
• 259Equitable Commerce contained the now-familiar exposition of the labor note currency, with variations resulting from discrepancies which previous trial now exposed. Warren sought to solve the problem caused by the refusal of some members in his previous labor exchange to participate in accepting similar amounts of any member’s time. This came as a result of his declaration that work of greatest repugnance was worthy of the highest remuneration, since distastefulness must be considered one of the elements of “cost” if anyone was to perform the unpleasant tasks in a non-coercive society. It was felt that the undermining of this principle destroyed the whole basis of the labor exchange plan. Another novelty in the statement of the labor notes bore on the issue created by persons with different evaluations of labor time. Although Warren had repudiated gold and silver and all other commodity-backed moneys as inferior to the direct matching of labor for labor, in Equitable Commerce he decided that there should be an alternative to the acceptance of the actual labor of the person presenting any given note. This resulted in the concession to back the labor currency with “Indian” corn, which was judged to be superior to metals with respect to ease of determining its cost of production in man hours. All subsequent labor notes bore guarantees of payment in a number of pounds of corn.
• 260Warren had no intention of creating a sensational incident and a focus for violent language by placing his ideas and the results of his investigations and experiences within the perusing reach of those with polemical predispositions. The concluding pages had a note of abdication on his part in the event of such incidence, which in many ways was the index of Warren’s personality and a source of criticism at a later time:
• 261The discovery of a colonial precedent neither detracted from Greene’s enthusiasm for his project nor cast any suspicions upon his independent status as an innovator. With the financial writings of others, however, he was already familiar, particularly Kellogg and Proudhon. It is highly probable that he learned from both, even though later editions of his works carried sharp criticisms of some of their theories. Favorable quotations of Kellogg in several of his works indicated a thorough reading at one time of Labor and Other Capital. His knowledge of Proudhon appears to have been somewhat less thorough until after a stay in France in the late ‘50’s, during which time he became personally acquainted with the internationally-known French anarchist. It is most inaccurate to speak of Greene simply as a proponent of Proudhonian principles.
• 262Coming at a time when the labor and consumer groups were experimenting with “associated workshops” and “protective union stores,” Greene suggested that the mutual bank be incorporated in the movement, forming what he called “complementary units of production, consumption, and exchange, . . . the triple formula of practical mutualism.” This program of mutualism he considered best adapted to local community level. In times of economic distress, the mutual money would prove the bulwark against inflationary or deflationary pressures: “the town cannot fail disastrously, for the real property is always there, rooted in the very ground.”
• 263For some time the campaign ran strongly to obtain a charter from the Massachusetts General Court for the establishment of a mutual bank. Greene, now in Boston, argued the case before the Town and Country Club of which he was a member, along with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Henry James, the elder, W. H. Channing, Octavius B. Frothingham, William D. Ticknor, Charles Sumner, E. R. Hoar, Henry Giles, John Orvis, and George B. Loring. Repeated petitions to the General Court were made in 1850-51 both under his sponsorship and that of groups of inhabitants of Brookfield, Ware and Warren. In 1857 he restated his financial arguments in a volume titled The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, and the Advantages of a Mutual Currency, under the stimulation of the new panic assailing the nation’s economy. Apathy was the principal response. Shortly thereafter Greene left for France, where he became interested for a time in mathematics, concern over social matters abating until after the war.
• 264For some time the campaign ran strongly to obtain a charter from the Massachusetts General Court for the establishment of a mutual bank. Greene, now in Boston, argued the case before the Town and Country Club of which he was a member, along with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Henry James, the elder, W. H. Channing, Octavius B. Frothingham, William D. Ticknor, Charles Sumner, E. R. Hoar, Henry Giles, John Orvis, and George B. Loring. Repeated petitions to the General Court were made in 1850-51 both under his sponsorship and that of groups of inhabitants of Brookfield, Ware and Warren. In 1857 he restated his financial arguments in a volume titled The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, and the Advantages of a Mutual Currency, under the stimulation of the new panic assailing the nation’s economy. Apathy was the principal response. Shortly thereafter Greene left for France, where he became interested for a time in mathematics, concern over social matters abating until after the war.
• 265Greene’s Equality contained other than his money and banking theories. Some of his sociological ideas, albeit evidencing little logical organization and often contradictory, appeared here and there in its pages. One was his assertion that as an individual, a man received certain rights at creation, but that the right of property was not one of them. This was a social creation, and was not absolute. “Society gives me . . . proprietorship . . . because it is for its own interests to do so; my right to my watch is not a natural, but a social right. I own it, not because I earned it, . . . but by the free grace and favor of society.” Greene’s conception of individualism, however, was religious in nature. Although failing to describe the rights which the individual received from God, he condemned coercion of any kind as a contention against God Himself. It was therefore “profoundly immoral” to make a man dependent upon his neighbors or upon public opinion, which made him “subservient to his accidents, instead of supreme over them.”
• 266Greene’s Equality contained other than his money and banking theories. Some of his sociological ideas, albeit evidencing little logical organization and often contradictory, appeared here and there in its pages. One was his assertion that as an individual, a man received certain rights at creation, but that the right of property was not one of them. This was a social creation, and was not absolute. “Society gives me . . . proprietorship . . . because it is for its own interests to do so; my right to my watch is not a natural, but a social right. I own it, not because I earned it, . . . but by the free grace and favor of society.” Greene’s conception of individualism, however, was religious in nature. Although failing to describe the rights which the individual received from God, he condemned coercion of any kind as a contention against God Himself. It was therefore “profoundly immoral” to make a man dependent upon his neighbors or upon public opinion, which made him “subservient to his accidents, instead of supreme over them.”
• 267In another respect he was much less indefinite. Equality contained one of the first of the anarchist arraignments of socialism as a system of societal organization. Socialism, averred Greene, was the only political system in which he could see no “good points.” In other types he saw a few privileged groups such as nobles, slaveholders, or “usurers” who managed to gather some advantages as compared to the volume of evil endured by “the mass of the people,” but no one appeared to gain under socialism:
• 268Greene’s career after his advocacy of the mutual bank was as much an account of irreconcilables as that which had previously transpired. Although abhorring government beyond the local level, he joined the Democratic party. At the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1853 he championed minority representation and woman suffrage. He was also an outspoken abolitionist. Wealthy by inheritance and marriage, he returned from his stay in France at the outbreak of the Civil War, and became commander of the 14th Massachusetts Regiment, later resigning after a quarrel with Governor Andrew.
• 269Greene’s career after his advocacy of the mutual bank was as much an account of irreconcilables as that which had previously transpired. Although abhorring government beyond the local level, he joined the Democratic party. At the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1853 he championed minority representation and woman suffrage. He was also an outspoken abolitionist. Wealthy by inheritance and marriage, he returned from his stay in France at the outbreak of the Civil War, and became commander of the 14th Massachusetts Regiment, later resigning after a quarrel with Governor Andrew.
• 270Activity in the ranks of the intellectual radicals once more absorbed his interest at the end of the war. He restated most of his social philosophy in a small book titled Sovereignty of the People, at about the time Heywood’s Worcester group began to demonstrate interest in the mutual bank literature. The reprinting of an enlarged edition of Mutual Banking, the formation of the Labor Reform Leagues, and Heywood’s publication of The Word all found in Greene a ready supporter and participant. In the latter part of 1872 he became a member of the French Section of the Marxian International Working People’s Association in Boston. Shortly afterward he became president of the New England Labor Reform League. This affiliation placed the N. E. L. R. L. as a whole under suspicion as a branch of the International. The aims of the former were alleged to be a mere restatement of those of “the foreign communists.” Although he collaborated with French members in the formulation of an address outlining the principles of the International Working People’s Association, which was subsequently read before the N. E. L. R. L. at the 1873 convention, it appears that neither he nor the League continued relations. This is borne out by Greene’s critical writings concerning communism and his first translations of Proudhon’s writings.
• 271Activity in the ranks of the intellectual radicals once more absorbed his interest at the end of the war. He restated most of his social philosophy in a small book titled Sovereignty of the People, at about the time Heywood’s Worcester group began to demonstrate interest in the mutual bank literature. The reprinting of an enlarged edition of Mutual Banking, the formation of the Labor Reform Leagues, and Heywood’s publication of The Word all found in Greene a ready supporter and participant. In the latter part of 1872 he became a member of the French Section of the Marxian International Working People’s Association in Boston. Shortly afterward he became president of the New England Labor Reform League. This affiliation placed the N. E. L. R. L. as a whole under suspicion as a branch of the International. The aims of the former were alleged to be a mere restatement of those of “the foreign communists.” Although he collaborated with French members in the formulation of an address outlining the principles of the International Working People’s Association, which was subsequently read before the N. E. L. R. L. at the 1873 convention, it appears that neither he nor the League continued relations. This is borne out by Greene’s critical writings concerning communism and his first translations of Proudhon’s writings.
• 272Activity in the ranks of the intellectual radicals once more absorbed his interest at the end of the war. He restated most of his social philosophy in a small book titled Sovereignty of the People, at about the time Heywood’s Worcester group began to demonstrate interest in the mutual bank literature. The reprinting of an enlarged edition of Mutual Banking, the formation of the Labor Reform Leagues, and Heywood’s publication of The Word all found in Greene a ready supporter and participant. In the latter part of 1872 he became a member of the French Section of the Marxian International Working People’s Association in Boston. Shortly afterward he became president of the New England Labor Reform League. This affiliation placed the N. E. L. R. L. as a whole under suspicion as a branch of the International. The aims of the former were alleged to be a mere restatement of those of “the foreign communists.” Although he collaborated with French members in the formulation of an address outlining the principles of the International Working People’s Association, which was subsequently read before the N. E. L. R. L. at the 1873 convention, it appears that neither he nor the League continued relations. This is borne out by Greene’s critical writings concerning communism and his first translations of Proudhon’s writings.
• 273Activity in the ranks of the intellectual radicals once more absorbed his interest at the end of the war. He restated most of his social philosophy in a small book titled Sovereignty of the People, at about the time Heywood’s Worcester group began to demonstrate interest in the mutual bank literature. The reprinting of an enlarged edition of Mutual Banking, the formation of the Labor Reform Leagues, and Heywood’s publication of The Word all found in Greene a ready supporter and participant. In the latter part of 1872 he became a member of the French Section of the Marxian International Working People’s Association in Boston. Shortly afterward he became president of the New England Labor Reform League. This affiliation placed the N. E. L. R. L. as a whole under suspicion as a branch of the International. The aims of the former were alleged to be a mere restatement of those of “the foreign communists.” Although he collaborated with French members in the formulation of an address outlining the principles of the International Working People’s Association, which was subsequently read before the N. E. L. R. L. at the 1873 convention, it appears that neither he nor the League continued relations. This is borne out by Greene’s critical writings concerning communism and his first translations of Proudhon’s writings.
• 274Between 1872-1876 Heywood and the League made several attempts to obtain a charter for a mutual bank from the Massachusetts General Court, but to no avail. The earliest of these was buried in the Committee on Banks and Banking, three of whose seven members were bankers themselves. The general treatment received strengthened the convictions of prominent members of the League that “legislatures are made up of capitalists who draw pay for serving their own interests, not the people’s.” Greene participated in general criticism of the legislature but gave no evidence of entertaining hope that opposition might be overcome.
• 275Greene returned to Europe in the spring of 1878. His premature death in Weston, England during this same year brought to an end the career of the ablest native American anarchist writer and theorist on finance. Mutual Banking remained prominent in the individualist propaganda thereafter without additions or abridgement. It was widely read by those interested in radical currency, and has been reprinted repeatedly up to the present day.
• 276Greene returned to Europe in the spring of 1878. His premature death in Weston, England during this same year brought to an end the career of the ablest native American anarchist writer and theorist on finance. Mutual Banking remained prominent in the individualist propaganda thereafter without additions or abridgement. It was widely read by those interested in radical currency, and has been reprinted repeatedly up to the present day.