Men Against the State

CHAPTER VI

Heralds of the Transition to Philosophical Egoism II

3. J. K. Ingalls, Land Reformer

The contributions of Greene to anarchist economics in formulating a system of finance adapted to the free economy were matched by those of Joshua K. Ingalls with respect to the land problem. Born in Swansea, Massachusetts on July 16, 1816,1 his early life was spent in circumstances somewhat different than those which surrounded Heywood and Greene. There are a number of striking similarities upon comparison with the early training and careers of those of his fellow Yankees which may be observed, nevertheless.

Ingalls spent the first thirty years of his life in a period of tumultuous reform in many fields, getting involved in many of them. He became a convert to Quaker beliefs while still a boy. Temperance and the dietary ideas of Sylvester Graham claimed his attention and support for a time. During a period of employment as an industrial worker in Rhode Island, he enthusiastically backed the ten hour movement in that state, but withdrew after differences over a matter of tactics cooled his hopes of fundamental reform.2 Impressed by a discussion on interest and its power to increase geometrically, he had argued that the basic dispute was not between the worker and his immediate employer but between the workers as “producers” and those whom he designated as “accumulators.” These persons he called the “interest and profit getters” during his later years.3 He admitted finding little or no support for this theory, the laborers of his acquaintance being as favorable to accepting interest on what little they might put aside as those operating on a much larger scale. A brief career in the ministry, during which he invoked biblical remonstrances against the taking of interest while denying the power of capital and money to multiply of themselves, prepared the way for his full-fledged participation in economic radicalism.

By 1841 he was espousing the labor theory of value and attempting to impress his listeners with the deteriorating effects of interest-taking. He made the acquaintance of the leading figures in the Land Reform Society in 1845,4 and henceforth his interest in a religious career began to wane. From this time on his name was mentioned more and more in connection with those of George Henry Evans, John Windt, John Commerford, William Rowe, Henry Beeney, A. J. H. Duganne, W. H. Van Amringe, Louis Hine, Lewis Masquerier and others interested in passage of legislation restricting the size of land holdings.5 Interest in land limitation in one aspect or another was to be a prominent part of his life for over half a century thereafter.

Ingalls’ next five years was a period of constant participation in a variety of reform and radical groups and movements. Besides attendance at the Industrial Congresses of 1847 and 1848, his activities brought him into contact with currency reformers, Fourierites, anti-slavery men, and the small association of anarchists in New York.6 He described the attempt of the land reformers to place a presidential ticket in the field in 1848, when the Industrial Congress met in Philadelphia, and the dissolution of the land limitation plank within the more sensational slavery issue during the creation of the Free Soil party.7

Ingalls, along with Evans, Windt and Van Amringe, stuck to land reform in the face of charges of indifference to the plea for freedom for the negro brought against them by anti-slavery preachers and those whom he preferred to call the “strict constructionists.” This same charge was made against members of the “laboring class,” he noticed, by prominent anti-slavery members of the community. Ingalls insisted that laborers could not profess moral and social duties which the abolitionists considered proper for them to demonstrate while insecure, deprived of land and home, and surrounded by the “trickeries” of business and the domineering of the professional men. It was the contention of Ingalls that the abolition of slavery and the abolition of land monopoly were inseparable. The abolition of slavery would have little effect on land monopoly, but abolition of land monopoly would make slavery impossible.8 He further argued that competition among the most poorly paid class of wage workers would be greatly intensified by the influx of “free” negro labor, and setting a man free without allowing him access to land was a mockery. In a debate with Frederick Douglass in Providence, Rhode Island in November 1848, Ingalls declared that “the rent system and the wage system had broken up more families and separated more husbands and wives than ever had chattel slavery.”9

Ingalls eventually took a completely materialistic point of view toward the institution, asserting that it was not love of being a master but the ability to appropriate the results of labor which made slaveholding attractive. It was not prejudice and enmity toward slaves that restrained white laborers from supporting emancipation but fear that liberty would help negroes to crowd them from their wage-earning opportunities.10 Although his argument had little effect, it still remained part of his philosophy after Reconstruction. Failure of the administration to effect any substantial alteration in land ownership in the South was a source of curiosity to him, and passage of the Homestead Act left him unimpressed. He considered it “so emasculated by political trickery” that it did little to alleviate the conditions of the increasing numbers of the landless, while enough land had been voted to railroads by the politicians to have furnished a farm of 25 acres to every family in the country.11

The failure of the land reformers to make a satisfactory alliance with the anti-slavery forces ended Ingalls’ interest in national politics. It was during this same time that his initial concern with economic reform was increased by contact with other groups of thinkers pre-occupied with economic radicalism. While at the home of Theodore Dwight Weld,12 he met John H. and Freeman Hunt, and through these men, Edward Kellogg, whose Labor and Other Capital,13 destined to be the bible of the Greenbackers and the National Labor Union, had just been published. Although disagreeing with Kellogg’s doctrine that one of the proper functions of money was to earn interest for its owner, he saw much in his work which was commendable.14 He contributed to Fourierite papers, including the Univercoelum, from time to time, but refused to unite with them in any project due to their refusal to subscribe to the limitation scheme of land occupation.

Ingalls’ first acquaintance with anarchism took place at about this time also. As a contributor to The Spirit of the Age, a Fourierist periodical edited by William H. Channing, he first learned of the work of P. J. Proudhon through the series of articles written by Charles A. Dana in the late fall of 1849.15 At about the same time he also met Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews in New York, preparing for the settlement of “Modern Times.” He admitted being influenced by the ideas of these three men: “I was impressed with the accuracy of their statement of the industrial, economic, financial and social questions.” But he became no closer associated with them than with the Fourierists a few years earlier, due to his concern over land reform.16 Neither of these two groups considered land limitation doctrines of any value. Ingalls felt they were the solution to the problem of poverty:17

The earth, with its vast resources of mineral wealth, its spontaneous productions and its fertile soil, the free gift of God and the common patrimony of mankind, has for long centuries been held in the grasp of one set of oppressors, by right of conquest or right of discovery; and is now held by another, through the right of purchase from them. All of man’s natural possessions . . . have been claimed as property; nor has man himself escaped the insatiate jaws of greed. This invasion of his rights and possessions has resulted . . . in clothing property with a power to accumulate an income.

Having given up belief in effecting reforms through legislation, Ingalls also entered the field of colonization in hopes of achieving a way of life free from commercialism. In December 1849, while in Southington, Connecticut, he began plans for the establishment of a community.18 Whether he was aware of the Warrenite town in Ohio or not was never indicated, but his plans and objectives pointed in a very similar direction. Through the pages of the Spirit of the Age he sought persons interested in a small coöperative. A capital backing of from $200-$300 per family was thought sufficient, while investment of other capital by outsiders was considered, provided “capital could be satisfied with a return of value for value, a simple conservation of its worth.” It was Ingalls’ intention “to build up a community where rent and interest and even speculative profit would be practically unknown, and the conveniences for social life, education, etc. . . . gradually and naturally developed.”19

He expected the contemplated colony, variously designated as the “Mutual Township,” the “Co-operative Brotherhood,” and finally the “Valley Farm Association,”20 to grow in a logical manner, commencing with the purchase of “select public lands,” which were to be prepared for cultivation by an advance group. The next step was to be the coöperative construction of log cabins, with the utilization of “labor-saving” machinery commencing soon after. Carpenters, masons, blacksmiths and other artisans were anticipated at the site as fast as their services could be utilized. Beyond the land arrangement which restricted land appropriations to ten acres per member of the colonizing families, and prohibition against taking or paying rent or interest, no aspects of “blueprinting” were evident in the projected settlement. It was Ingalls’ belief that the group would form their own organization along lines of voluntary association when the experiment in social living had been practically and successfully demonstrated. “Every man will be rewarded according to his work” was to be the motto, the understanding being that each was to receive the “whole product of his labor.”21

Hopeful of accomplishing the desired ends without excessive capital investments or a large number of participants, he went ahead with plans for possible locations, finally settling on a site on the Little Kanawha River in West Virginia between Parkersburg and Marietta. Meetings in January and February, 1850 in New York City resulted in a larger volume of interest in the projected colony than he believed existed. Individuals from Maine to Ohio expressed desires to become party to the undertaking, which began almost spontaneously without Ingalls’ participation a short while later during his attendance at an Industrial Congress in Chicago.22

If the Valley Farm Association was intended to become a halfway experiment between the Fourierist and anarchist examples already attempted, the effort was to prove unsatisfactory, from Ingalls’ point of view at least. The history of the colony is obscure. Ingalls reported that coöperative ideas were abandoned at an early date, but that the group, somewhat diminished in numbers, continued to have a pleasant existence and to enjoy comfortable homes and a congenial social environment. As late as 1865 he reported that there was still a settlement functioning on this location. This brought his participation in, or initiation of, such interests to an end: “I abandoned the idea of becoming a Moses, or even a Joshua, of an associative movement,” he soberly observed many years later.23 Activity in reform was for him from now on a matter “purely of good will.”

The death of George Henry Evans in 1856, followed by the Civil War and the passing of the Homestead Act, all served to inhibit and neutralize the activities of the National Land Reform Association for a time. It once more became active with the advent of leaner times and the dispersal of wartime prosperity in the early 70’s. Its members communicated with the Land Tenure Reform Association and the Land and Labour League of England during the summer of 1872, although the objectives of the American group differed utterly from those of the English organizations, which favored land nationalization.24 The Evans associates had stressed legislation limiting the size of land holdings. Now, under the influence of Ingalls, the corresponding secretary, their sole approach was centered around a campaign calling for the repeal of existing legislation and land laws which granted protection to land titles not based on personal occupancy.

Ingalls’ activities were not confined to the Land Reform Association. He was one of a considerable group of New England anarchists25 who formed the American Labor Reform League. He wrote for Heywood’s Word from its inception, as well as contributing to a variety of other reform and radical periodicals. At the same time he produced a succession of pamphlets which hammered away at economic evils in the post-war economy of concentration and centralization.

Although absorbed in studying the influence of business failures, credit stringency and the financial panic, as well as the effects of the return to the gold standard, Ingalls stubbornly adhered to his favorite thesis: monopolization of the soil as the principal source of economic disorder and distress. In a pamphlet titled Land and Labor, which Heywood published for him early in 1872, in numerous articles in the Word, and in two other short works appearing in 1878 under the titles Work and Wealth and Periodical Business Crises, he discussed the land issue.26 He insisted that any hope from “schemes of currency and finance” was “wholly fallacious” as long as land remained “the subject of speculative monopoly”; “Repeal our unreasonable land laws, half feudal and half civil, so that organized injustice can no longer have the land for its fulcrum, and you will find the lever money, now so weighty for wrong, to be the most serviceable and inoffensive of servants.”27 He sanctioned land limitation by occupation and use alone, still believing that a labor exchange currency on the basis of the time note advocated by Warren would solve the problem of the medium of exchange.

In Periodical Business Crises Ingalls presented the theory that the time required to allow a debt to double at 7% compound interest was roughly that which comprised the interval between depressions, and suggested that the government refuse to enforce the collection of any debt the amount of the face of which had already been paid in interest. In this category he placed the public debt, insisting that for the government to maintain “this species of property” at par, while other property was depreciating in some cases as much as half, was outright discrimination in favor of a particular group which “rendered no service to society.”28

Public opinion at this time was slowly becoming conscious of the industrial and commercial tycoon. Ingalls noted the influence of a new group of finance capitalists whose control of ownership of the soil was quietly but steadily advancing “as effectually as that of the titled nobility of any country ever did.” The government made no effort to correct the trend by legislation, and appeared to be professing that nothing could be done to alleviate the situation, which to him was pure hypocrisy. “May we not be allowed to inquire,” Ingalls interrogated, “into the workings of that legislation which has so lavishly bestowed, particularly in the last fifteen years, upon speculative schemes, to aid moneyed corporations, and enterprising adventurers of every description . . .?”29 If new legislation could not be passed, it still remained possible to repeal some of that existing, which led either to land monopoly or protected that already under monopoly. “The whole produce of labor belongs to the laborer, and is his natural reward,” he said, and absentee ownership, backed by the courts and the police, absorbed part of this by compelling the payment of ground rent.30 If such a doctrine was false, heretical, and incendiary, as it generally was regarded by the daily press, still there is little doubt as to its grassroots origin.

Ingalls had presented a theoretical case for the repeal of land laws as an incentive to bringing about occupation and use-tenure. His writings now took on a more pessimistic tone with the publication of Work and Wealth31 under avowedly anarchistic sponsorship. There were new ideas expressed in this brief study, some of them decidedly conservative and backward-looking. But his main point, emphasis upon the fundamental evil of land monopoly, was as prominent as ever. It was by this time wholeheartedly subscribed to by the Warrenite adherents. Ingalls contended that there were only two factors in production of wealth, land and labor. In line with his anti-interest stand, he identified capital as merely past labor and land frozen into a particular form and undeserving of increase in itself. To him the granting of a share of production to capital was placing a premium on past labor at the expense of present labor.32

It was a source of annoyance to him to see organized labor engrossed over wages and hours, to the exclusion of so vital a matter as land. He could not understand why it was not plain to all that private ownership of the soil by a few had supplanted slavery as the device whereby one man garnered wealth produced by the many. He believed that it was now time for the laboring man to become concerned with the sources of wealth, its production, and its distribution. The issue was not whether it was unwise to interfere with forces which had been transmitted “from previously existing conditions,” but whether it was time to attempt a “truly scientific solution” of the problem of production and the inequalities of distribution.33

He had no new recommendations to make concerning the area of his greatest interest, the land. It was with considerable regret that he commented upon the failure of the government to establish “a system of easy access to the soil or a judicious limitation to private ownership.”34 Such a course of action would have prevented the capital-labor, or employer-employee question from ever having become important. Yet he now shunned political action through the two major parties, whose leaders he thought had formed a “mutual ring,” conspiring “to make the plunder of public funds and public trusts a fine art.”35 He insisted that freedom of access to the soil and the opportunity for self-employment was a civil right, but felt that the process of concentration had proceeded to such an extent that it was a matter beyond the powers of working men to make right. All that remained was hope of benevolent action in the interests of the masses of the people on the part of a group of “social knights-errant.” Thinking in terms of Robert Owen, whom he greatly admired, along with Peter Cooper and Gerrit Smith, he thought men such as these might “organize industries on an equitable basis, promote emigration to districts less under landlord control, and channel charities into promoting self-employment and self-help.”36

The appearance of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty in 1880 brought from Ingalls, now a veteran of over 35 years in the fight for land reform, a number of scholarly attacks. Primarily reflecting his fear of the state, now somewhat expanded by the reading of the anarchist works of Proudhon, he concentrated on the possible effects of the state as a landlord, which he thought would result from the nationalization doctrine of George. Closer reading and comparison with his own economic concepts resulted in a wholesale indictment of George in the matter of fundamentals as well. This was fully developed in Social Wealth (1885) which, but for Ingalls’ dismissal of the currency question, might have become a general textbook of anarchist economics.

Ingalls, writing in the Irish World, as well as the anarchist periodicals The Word37 and Liberty38 asserted repeatedly that the logical consequence of the single tax was to convert all land occupants into tenants of the state. The annihilation of the class of allodial landholders in such fashion did not furnish protection from further extension of state power, nor did it eliminate the possibility of unlimited control of land through leasehold. This he thought would lead to a group of super-taxpayers, able to shunt the burden on to others less favorably situated. The end process would be the eventual payment of the tax by the lowest economic group, which to him meant the agricultural workers. Ingalls suspected the possibility of an alliance between government officials and large taxpayers under such a system as another grave source of corruption and abuse.39

In Social Wealth he continued in a much more forceful manner his criticism of taxing powers, which he called “the very essence of despotism,” and incapable of justification unless it was “in equation with some service which the taxing power rendered the taxed individual.” Once taxation got beyond the voluntary stage and became a compulsory thing, Ingalls averred that there was no point in arguing about forms of government, since any system employing compulsory taxation was a “despotism.” The use of taxation to right obvious wrongs was to him a makeshift. It served only to obscure the injustices which were causing the evil results that taxation intended to abate.40

Social Wealth, a work which was advertised and sold for fifteen years to the readers of the anarchist periodical press, is valuable primarily as a radical estimate of the landholding and business systems of America in the mid-80’s. Its main theme was that capitalism was essentially a super-structure erected upon a monopoly of land. Condemnation of the government as being responsible for this, and advocacy of the occupation-and-use-criteria as the basis of future land tenure, made it a substantial piece of propaganda for the native anarchist movement.

The fundamental idea underlying Ingalls’ stand on the land question was his interpretation of rent. Rent, he contended, was a political and not an economic affair. He stubbornly disagreed with the Ricardian school, which insisted that it was essential and could not be gotten rid of. To him this was the admission that “landlordism” could never be eliminated, and itself was based on the assumption that land was a commodity.41 This theory he claimed to be a by-product of the land title, and therefore of the governing power. If monopoly of the soil could once be established, then its owners were in a position to demand whatever the competitive forces of relative fertility and population pressure might bring. To reduce land to the status of a commodity was an act of usurpation, enabling a group to “profit by its relation to production” without the expenditure of labor time.42

Ingalls charged that the economists hardly made a pretense of discussing the origins of land titles, ignoring the subject because they “could give no justification to the system, for to trace any title back will yield us nothing . . . but forceful and fraudulent taking, even were land a proper subject for taking at all.”43 He advanced four reasons why he believed land was not a subject for permanent tenure and sale because: (1) it was not a product of human labor; (2) it was limited in amount and therefore unable to react to “demand” by increasing in “supply”; (3) it could not be removed and therefore could not be transferred; and (4) occupancy limited ownership and ended with abandonment of the location by the occupant or by his death.44 “Possession remains possession, and can never become property, in the sense of absolute dominion, except by positive statute. Labor can only claim occupancy, and can lay no claim to more than the usufruct.”45 One could hardly overlook the Jeffersonian flavor of this declaration, despite its conflict with existing and relatively unchallenged social usages with respect to land.

Ingalls disagreed completely with the Ricardian theory of rent, which maintained that rent was not an “arbitrary tribute,” resting not upon usurpation but the excess of product of the best land over the poorest. Was rent something which failed to exist until population increase forced the use of less productive soils? Ingalls maintained that the reverse was true; it was rent which forced the use of less productive soils. An increase of population, resulting in the need for land which could be denied by its titled holders, was the cause of rent.46 The end product of increased population in his view was a reduction in the number of landholders and an increase in tenancy. The result tended to approximate the extremes found in many parts of Europe, a landed aristocracy at one pole and a “wretched proletariat” at the other. It was his conviction, in the final analysis, that interest and profits were far more exploitive than rent, a point which he stated Henry George had neglected and which vitiated the latter’s whole plan.47

Ingalls claimed that capitalism in its existing form in the United States had been successful largely as a result of the successful playing of individual and social forces one against the other.48 Individual license had been used to monopolize wealth on the one hand, social forces as means of subjecting rebellious individuals on the other. Having gained exclusive control of the land by supporting individualism and personal freedom it then utilized social and civil powers to render its dominion absolute. Business was thus engaged simultaneously in lauding personal individual freedom and the omnipotence of the state, with the stress depending upon the advantage to be gained at the particular moment. Thus it was possible to observe campaigns to obtain high tariffs and subsidies through government aid, while at the same time the same interests were discouraging government attempts to ameliorate bad labor conditions, under the pretext that the latter course of action was an infringement upon the laborer’s freedom of contract.49

Although not as exhaustive an investigator into the anarchist theory of decay of competition as a cause of trusts as were some of his associates, the fact that equality of opportunity no longer existed under prevailing laws and customs was proof enough to Ingalls that defenders of the laissez-faire notions were guilty of large scale misrepresentation of the facts. He had no respect for the fanciful dogmas of Spencerian social evolution, based on Darwinian concepts of survival-of-the-fittest. It was the task of social science to effect intelligent rather than natural selection; for instance, in the case of farmers, weeds were the principal result of the latter course. Even the great advocates of natural selection, Spencer and Tyndall, were themselves the recipients of governmental assistance at one time. The preaching of such ideas in American colleges was equally absurd:50

Not only the institution which boasts the possession of a Sumner among its faculty, but every institution of its kind in our country is endowed by public or private beneficence, and could not survive a day if it should be withdrawn. It cannot fail to be seen how appropriate is the teaching of “laissez-faire” by the professors and scholars produced by institutions supported and upheld by the very opposite practice, . . . a system of capitalism dependent wholly upon laws and customs established and maintained to thwart equal opportunity and to prevent freedom of competition and exchange.

Ingalls indulged in no personal diatribes. He was firmly convinced that institutions rather than individuals were the issue. He saw no relief in reversing the positions of those in authority and those subjected to their direction. The wage worker turned “boss,” the “victim of usury,” the tenant turned usurer or rent-taker, all found the system good, upon receiving the favors it bestowed. Violent revolution was no answer, nor was legislation a fundamental reform. From his vantage-point, it appeared that the courts and judges would always reflect the social attitudes of the men of wealth. Even if temporarily eclipsed, there remained no assurance that their return to power would not result in demolishing the rectification of inequity achieved in their absence. Looking about him at the activities of the economic and social reformers, he saw what he characterized the same “infatuation” with specific remedies in the form of statutory provision. “A prohibitive law,” he observed in one instance, “is the dream of the reformer who seeks to make the world temperate.” Adhering to one of the fundamental positions of anarchist political philosophy, that improvements in civil institutions could be best brought about by education rather than by legislation, he insisted that eradication of social and economic “disease” would come from repeal of laws rather than further enactment of others.51

This policy he considered the effective solution to the problem of land monopoly. It need not be a drastic procedure, nor work a summary change. Present legal possessors of land might well retain their titles for the remainder of their lifetime, but subsequent titles would be geared strictly to occupancy and use. Thus no one would be deprived of rights currently enjoyed, but would be denied the opportunity of either conferring or acquiring future privileges operating to the detriment of others. Alfred Russel Wallace’s similar proposal of gradualism in land nationalization for England no doubt had some influence in resolving Ingalls’ practical suggestions.52

One of his firm convictions was the inevitability of land redistribution in the future. He did not predict the frequency of attempts, the path it might take, or the degree of peace or violence which might attend it. Slavery, sporadically eliminated, would recur in other forms until the general realization dawned that one’s own person was the natural limit to property in human beings. In a similar manner he maintained that the natural limit to property in land would be understood as the amount each person might occupy and use.53

Although living in virtual retirement in Glenora, New York, during the period of greatest literary activity among the native anarchist protagonists, Ingalls continued to supply steady contributions, principally in the nature of variations upon his favorite land theme. His hesitancy in openly allying with the Tucker group and Liberty54 stemmed primarily from the preoccupation of most of this faction with currency reform,55 a matter of universal interest in almost all portions of American society in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Adhering to his land ideas, he deplored all theorizing which preached relief through the medium of currency reform, especially that of the Greenbackers and other elements clamoring for cheap money.56 The issuance of fiat money by the state would certainly result in its being obtained by loan at decreased interest rates, he was willing to concede, but the inevitable rise in the price level would quickly nullify any possible gains which might be made by the “debtor classes.” In any juggling of the monetary system, Ingalls opined, the workers would eventually have to bear the burden, either through paying increased interest or standing for any losses which might result:57

It is only stupidity which prevents the currency reformer from seeing that the fantastic tricks wrought with money values are mainly due to the ability of a class, through pliant legislators, to play fast and loose with the instruments of commerce, so as to effect a sliding fulcrum to the economic balance; and by which even the legal tender may be made to mean a day or a half day’s work, according as a class are to pay it out, or have it paid to them.

Ingalls’ writings in the 90’s reflected more and more the political philosophy of anarchism. In an environment which was characterized by an increase of governmental powers and reform by statute law,58 his hope for a negative and gradually weakening political institution waned. The American government, in his words, was becoming little more than “a police force to regulate the people in the interests of the plutocracy.”59 The growth of centralization and “authoritative socialism” were more threatening circumstances than the negative stand of the anarchists. At one time he expressed the fear that an alliance between church and state was impending60 despite the long standing contrary American tradition. His fear arose from the increased influence of religious organizations in seeking passage of sumptuary legislation dealing with personal morality. His unconditional disapprobation of the use of violence partially influenced the attitude he held toward labor unions, although he saw justification for them as protection against employer combinations.61 All the advantages lay on the side of the industrial monopolist in any given strike for higher wages under the existing arrangement. Nevertheless he considered the only “intelligent” strike one which would be directed against wage work altogether.

A younger generation of anarchist writers took from Ingalls’ thought only the portions which best expressed their contentions. His long record in the struggle for land reform and his ultimate rejection of political action as a means of obtaining it made him a prominent figure in the anti-statist band. Occupation-and-use tenure of land, a nearly-forgotten theory in non-radical circles, became firmly established in anarchist teaching from the time of J. K. Ingalls.

4. Stephen Pearl Andrews, Social Philosopher

The course of American anarchism from the times of Josiah Warren to those of Benjamin Tucker includes the career of a fourth prominent exponent, Stephen Pearl Andrews, a participant in a number of reform and radical movements, but who, of the early group, was the only person to take part in the native anarchist movement in all its phases.

Andrews was born a few months before the outbreak of the War of 1812, in Templeton, Massachusetts,62 but followed an older brother to the South, where he experienced the insecure life of the reformer for the first time as a part of the anti-slavery movement. As a young lawyer, first in Louisiana and then in Texas, he achieved local notoriety from 1835 to 1843 as an opponent of slavery. In the latter year he was mobbed and driven out of Houston, reappearing a short while later in London as an agent of independent abolitionists of Texas. He put before Lord Aberdeen and Lord Palmerston a plan for the emancipation of Texan slaves through the medium of a British loan to Texas sufficient to cover their purchase and release. At this point he was abruptly repudiated by Ashbel Smith, Texan chargé d’affaires at London and Paris, who described his plan as an individual venture and not bearing the sanction of the government of Texas.63 This terminated Andrews’ active participation in such matters.

Upon his return to America he gained considerable repute as a pioneer in “phonetic transcription,” known today as shorthand. Over 30 editions of his introductory course books and manuals of “phonography,” written with the collaboration of Augustus F. Boyle, appeared between 1844 and 1849.64 Included in the series were works on philology, phonetic printing and language teaching.65

It was during this time also that Andrews was impressed by economic unrest in the country, reflected by Fourierist socialism, the gropings of a labor movement, and a steady flow of radical writings on the currency problem. He began his participation by writing articles for the Harbinger and by the late 40’s had become a convinced Fourierite. The meeting of the New England Labor Reform League in Boston in January, 1847 found Andrews taking part, along with other Fourierites, as one of the seven speakers heard during the convention.66

The return of Josiah Warren to Boston in 1848 signalled the end of Andrews’ efforts on behalf of association and his attachment to the more radical teachings of native anarchism. Just when he decided that the political and economic approach of Warren was superior to that which he supported before meeting the proponent of equitable commerce is not exactly known. Yet, by the winter of 1850, he was lecturing before the New York Mechanic’s Institute, presenting the individualist anarchist theories in a particularly well-conceived manner. The publication of Andrews’ analysis of Warren’s principles in 1852 under the general title The Science of Society was henceforth regarded by anarchists as the finest statement of Warrenism ever written.67

Andrews succeeded in transposing Warren’s Equitable Commerce from a rough-hewn pioneer document into a smoothly finished statement, but took no credit for any original contribution of his own:68

For the principles in question . . . the author confesses his great indebtedness . . . to the genius of Josiah Warren of Indiana, who has been engaged for more than twenty years in testing, almost in solitude . . . the principles which we are now for the first time presenting prominently to the public.

This was a fair assumption on Andrews’ part, since the two Midwest editions of Equitable Commerce had enjoyed limited circulation. The Science of Society series faithfully presented the Warren principles on individual sovereignty,69 free voluntary association and a cost basis economy.70 Andrews declared they were immutable principles. Conformity to these simple rules produced harmony in the affairs of mankind, departure from them, confusion. “We teach them as science,” he declared; “We do not ask that they shall be voted upon or applied under pledges.” In the introduction to the second of the series, Andrews remarked upon the difficulty of explaining to people “beset by the fog of old ideas” a social reorganization without a social compact. “We do not bring forward a System, a Plan, or a Constitution, to be voted on, adopted, or agreed to, by mankind at large, or by any set of men whatsoever. . . . It is the evil of compacts that the compact becomes sacred and the individual profane.”71

Andrews indicated from the nature of a number of criticisms a knowledge of some current allied activities and influences. The Garrisonian school of “no-government men” drew some expression of sympathy, although he considered their brand of “unterrified Democracy” theoretically consistent but practically illogical. Without economic reform in their desired social organization, degrading conditions would return and require violations of individual personal dignity once more. Reform was not synonymous with pure negation; if government was the source of societary disruption, it was necessary to introduce positive principles which would become the foundation of a stable society, otherwise, if temporarily replaced, government in the undesirable sense would soon return.72

Warren had refrained from specific mention of Fourierism in his first work. Andrews, on the other hand, declared the phalanx type of colonization “folly.” He criticized Edward Kellogg and John Gray73 for declaring one of the legitimate functions of money to be that of “measuring value.” He also undertook a more extended defense of the Warrenite theory which regarded “natural increase” of production, the result of natural forces giving advantage to the element of time, as not subject to the economic designation of “price” unless labor had accompanied the process. Interest might be justified on the basis of the spontaneous creation of wealth by natural factors, but this was true of just a certain stage of production. All types of wealth tended to deteriorate, and required labor for protection and augmentation.74

Andrews’ wrestling with the abstractions of Warrenite cost economy began to abate at about this time, but not before he succeeded in decoying Horace Greeley into a sociological controversy in the editorial columns of the New York Tribune.75 The discussion, which eventually drew in Henry James, raged through most of April, 1853. Andrews admitted twisting the topic under discussion so as to bring Warren’s ideas before a wider audience, but the character of some of the remarks indicated the extent of new influences. These were derived primarily from his wife, a doctor and an ardent suffragist, and Thomas and Mary S. Gove Nichols, pioneers of the “women’s rights” movement76 in the New York area.

The columns of the Tribune were utilized for three principal purposes; to denounce Greeley as a reactionary, to set forth the Warren-Andrews theory of social organization, and to open a new avenue of discussion in the matter of feminine equality. Andrews declared that those interested in reform were making a mistake in considering Greeley as a leader, for he was in reality a deeply conservative man. His espousal of Fourierism was superficial, and he had shown his real self by his sanction of respect for authority in economic matters, in political organization, and in the social relations of men and women. Andrews dwelt on Greeley’s aversion for divorce and contrasted it with the growing tendency of self-expression on the part of an increasing minority of militant femininity.

Torn between his regard for Fourier, whom he praised as “about the most remarkable genius who has yet lived,”77 and his new-found respect for Warren, the “Euclid of social science,”78 Andrews set forth a defense of the latter’s principles, with allusions to their functioning under actual living conditions at “Modern Times,” over two years old at the time of writing. “It is something to be able to affirm,” he wrote, “that there is at least one town in existence where women and children receive equal remuneration for their labor with men, not from benevolence, but upon a well-organized principle of justice, and by general concurrence, without pledges or constraint.”79

Andrews believed that the real basic difference between Greeley and himself was bound up in their belief as to the fundamental theory of government. There were only two; the first, to which he claimed Greeley subscribed, declared that man was an irresponsible agent, not capable of governing himself and in need of another man to supply that function; the second, that man was potentially capable of governing himself.80 The degree of failure to do so in practice merely indicated lack of practice. This should not be surrendered through the fear of evil consequences attending more failure, since it was something which man had to learn as he did learn other things. Of one thing Andrews was convinced, that the individual was entitled to the exercise of such self-government as avoided at all times encroachment upon all other persons. To him, the non-invasive individual was the unit of orderly society, and was entitled to immunity from coercion by institutions:81

The most stupendous mistake that this world of ours has ever made is that of erecting an abstraction, the State, the Church, Public Morality, according to some accepted standard, . . . into a real personality, and making it paramount to the will and happiness of the individual.

He had embraced Warren’s teachings without a consideration of their implications three or four years before. Andrews now displayed a realization of the root-and-branch anti-statism to which they logically pointed. The correspondence with Greeley and James contained the high-water mark of Andrews’ anarchistic convictions, even though he would have rejected the appellation of “anarchist” had it been an expression in contemporary usage other than as a synonym for chaos. Few anarchists of succeeding generations ever wrote a categorical rejection of the coercive state in more emphatic terms than he during the exchanges with Horace Greeley:82

Give up . . . the search after the remedy for the evils of government in more government. The road lies just the other way—toward individuality and freedom from all government. . . . It is the inherent viciousness of the very institution of government itself, never to be got rid of until our natural individuality of action and responsibility is restored. Nature made individuals, not nations; and while nations exist at all, the liberties of the individual must perish.

The invasion of anarchist “Modern Times” by the social philosophy of Auguste Comte and his first disciple in America, Henry Edger, has been already described.83 Edger abandoned Warrenite individualism primarily to establish a cell of Comte’s Religion of Humanity. The Comtean sociological concepts, on the other hand, succeeded in gradually weaning Stephen Pearl Andrews away from Warren and the Long Island band. The change took place in an unobtrusive, almost unconscious manner, yet by the late summer of 1857, the tenets of Positivism had become incorporated in his social thought. Henceforth his principal intellectual concern was that of sociological system-building. The attempt to fuse the diverse contributions of Fourier, Warren, and Comte into a grandiose eclectic social order of Pantarchy was under way. Anarchist thought, discussions and literature, previously concerned with political and economic considerations, now included a third element, ethics, with Andrews undertaking the torturous task of reconciling antithetical conceptions of the nature of human society. A thorough-going anarchist no longer, his relations with them continued for the remainder of his life in one situation or another.

Andrews began his comparison of Warren and Comte in Warren’s own Periodical Letter of September, 1857.84 At the same time, in an article in a New York spiritualist journal titled “Physiocracy, The New Order of Government,”85 he revealed the influence of Comtean concepts and his defection from the ranks of the uncompromising Warren individualists. By now he had come to the conclusion that there were two main obstacles to complete dispensation of government: ( 1 ) the magnitude of interests in which human society was already involved; and (2) “the necessity for an authority vested somewhere to restrain encroachments and enforce obedience to commands.” Such declarations were rank heresy when compared with his affirmations in his Science of Society, even though his proposed “physiocracy” contained a large element of voluntary association. Leadership in nature, said Andrews, was always vested in a single individual: “She never entrusts the business of governing to Committees and Boards.” Thus direct responsibility and “unity of movement” were secured. It was his interpretation, furthermore, that obedience to leadership in nature was not obtained by compulsion but by “attraction,” wherein it was a matter of greater agreeability to obey rather than to dissent. “Obedience to attraction, or the pursuit of the Agreeable, is the essence of Freedom,” a manifestation of individual action fully free from constraint.86 In this manner, he concluded, did nature effect the reconciliation of seemingly antagonistic principles. Until persuasion and changeability were substituted for coercion and permanence in human social systems, the efforts of “statesmen” would produce nothing of lasting importance:87

Natural government is characterized by the absence of all organization which is not as natural and therefore as inevitable as crystallization; by the self-election, or spontaneous recognition of leaders, coupled with the continuous freedom of revolt on the part of the subject.

Thus the basic premises of a social scheme appeared, which was not fully developed for fifteen years. Andrews, no longer attached to the “Modern Times” community, was now living in New York in the company of a group of people connected more or less with the North American Phalanx,88 a Fourierite colony in New Jersey.89 Under his influence, a number of these people, mostly journalists, pooled resources and conducted for a time a coöperative residence in the city called the Unitary Home. The Home was operated under the management of Edward F. Underhill on Warren’s cost price principle in the allocation of the economic burdens of operation. Andrews, now working on the basics of an universal language which he called “Alwato,” lived there as did the poet Edmund Clarence Stedman.90 Close by was DeGarmo Hall, where Andrews occasionally lectured on his gradually developing sociology.91

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Andrews abandoned his investigations for a time, his abolitionist background welling up while he asserted the righteousness of the cause of the North. Like Warren, the freedom of individuals was of greater importance to him than that of the Southern states. He paused long enough to indicate that the economic issue which had been growing during the pre-eminence of the slavery question in American affairs was by no means reconciled or dissolved:92

The scientific and harmonious adjustment of the relations of capital to labor, of the employees to the employer . . . will still remain after Slavery is dead, . . . the next great practical question which will force itself upon our attention, and insist upon being definitively settled . . .

In the post-war period, Andrews became deeply involved in the movement for women’s rights, his interests centering on social issues. This resulted in an intellectual alliance with the extremists under the nominal leadership of Victoria Woodhull. As an editorial partner in the publication of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, he again made contact with the anarchists, primarily through attendance at the individualist-dominated conventions of the American and New England Labor Reform Leagues. His renewal of acquaintance with Warren after a meeting in New York in May, 1871 brought about a long hair-splitting controversy in the pages of the Weekly between the two over their sociological differences. Andrews now had placed most of his pantarchal system in manuscript form or in published articles in periodicals. The main point of the dispute between the two centered about the interpretation of the words “right” and “duty.” Warren, adhering to his basic views, insisted that in a world of free contract, there was no such thing as duty, only rights. A person able to live by uncoerced voluntary contract, he declared, did things not because he felt under obligation to do so but because it was to his best interests. In non-compulsive situations, Warren believed that no one would enter into agreements, contracts, or commitments which tended to operate to his disadvantage. Thus, what appeared to be compliance with a conscientious feeling of obligation to act in a certain way would actually be the fulfillment of one’s side of a particular social arrangement, through recognition of the advancement of one’s personal interests or fortunes by so doing, and therefore hardly worthy of designation as “duty.”93

Andrews, now admittedly trying to present a synthesis of the Warrenite and Comtean schools of social science, said that there were separate categories of duties and rights, and that it was not proper for the two groups, the individualists and the positivists, to maintain that it was a matter entirely of either rights, as did Warren, or all duties, as did the followers of Comte. Andrews at this time admitted that he had never rejected Fourierism even though he apparently had been a convinced follower of the anarchist beliefs of Warren.94 This contradictory position did not indicate or imply that he had rejected the principles of sovereignty of the individual and cost as the limit of price. It was the matter of difficulty in getting them adopted. “The real objections” to these, he explained, “are that men cannot and will not accept and apply such purely abstract principles,” even though they were “a very precious element in every true organization.” For having expressed them, and for trying to put them into practical operation, Andrews concluded, “Mr. Warren will and should forever rank as one of the first Sociologists, although his principles may find themselves practically vindicated under forms of society very different from . . . what he has in idea.”95

Whether society is an organism in which individuals play certain parts on the basis of established rules and relationships, or whether society is a collection of individuals and reflects the quality and attainment of individuals, has not yet been satisfactorily thrashed out, despite current trends. This controversial matter was being then discussed also. Andrews, in his Basic Outline of Universology, published in 1872, sought to reconcile Warren’s stand of society as merely the byproduct of the actions of separate individual sovereigns with the organic view of Comte and Fourier.96 Between Warren and Comte, he considered the former’s approach the “scientific,” Comte’s “metaphysical and philosophical,” and the issue a matter of “Individualism” against “Subordination.”97 Fourier he considered the pioneer in attempting to reconcile the two, and “association by attraction” appears prominently in the Andrews program of “Integralism.” The problem of the individual and his relation to “society,” elaborated on by Andrews in Universology, can be associated with his part in the propaganda of anti-statism in the period prior to the Civil War. Nor can he be dismissed from consideration as an American sociologist.98 But the book itself is a painful demonstration of writing, loaded with neologisms and obscurantist techniques.

As close associate of Mrs. Woodhull, he played a prominent part in the sensational “exposure” of Henry Ward Beecher in 1873. He had known Beecher over a score of years previous.99 The conflict between Andrews and Henry James was re-opened100 at this same time, as the result of the violent disturbance being created by the “free love” propaganda campaign of the Woodhull-Andrews group in New York City. Andrews’ attack on state interference with marriage was regarded as an endorsement of unbridled license,101 and for many years he was suspected of operating a “school for wayward wives,” the women associated with the Woodhull campaign being reputed for their outspoken and individualistic behavior, as well as their lack of respect for male superiority pretensions.

A renewed interest in the economic ideas of Proudhon and Warren took place after the death of the latter, in which Greene, Heywood, Linton and Tucker led the way. Andrews’ contacts with this circle revealed another holdover among his ideas.102 His article “The Labor Dollar” in Tucker’s Radical Review revealed his continued attachment to Warren’s views on money.103 He admitted that both had failed in devising a self-regulating system of currency and banking based directly on labor, their chief objective.

A day’s work of eight hours rather than a single hour should constitute the “labor dollar,” was Andrews’ reconsidered judgment. To be accurate, it must represent two other factors, degree of intensity or severity, and acquired skill. He believed that in the matter of intensity, an assumed average was still the best approach, approximately what Warren’s corn labor note had purported to do.104 By adjusting this assumed average constantly, as the group at “Utopia” had done, the true average intensity would be reached. Thus, for instance, the eight hour day of average intensity would tend to be estimated in greater production per hour, as skill and ability in that particular occupation became increasingly attracted to it. With the establishment of complete freedom of access to occupations, the tendency would be for those who produced the most in the shortest amount of time in each productive job to become well known:105

This change will enable them to know far better than they now know what labors they really like best, and are willing to do at the cheapest rate. There will then grow up a legitimate labor market, and all kinds of labor and products will be tendered at the minimum price as measured by the average estimate of the degree of severity of the labor involved in the labor involved in them.

In most other respects, Andrews deviated little from what he had written a quarter century before. Acquired skill was considered an element of labor cost, while superior natural ability was not.106 The immense difficulty of separating the two attributes Andrews passed over.

The outbreak of the railroad strike in 1877 brought mixed reactions from Andrews; the coming to grips of labor and capital which he and Warren had predicted thirty years before was undoubtedly at hand. “There is a new order of things here now, or inevitably about to come,” he intoned. A social or “industrial” revolution, involving “the whole laboring population,” was about to take place; “A ready acceptance of the situation on the part of the rich and the great” alone would prevent grave irregularities, as “the theory of shooting them down is futile.”

Andrews displayed the distance which he had strayed from his anarchist views of an earlier time, however, by the nature of the reforms he expected the strikers to propose and obtain:107

. . . the forced transfer of all railroads, magnetic telegraphs, and great public works to the government, with the laborers paid fixed and equitable prices, as government employes; the organization of great government work shops, or organized government colonization, or other similar enterprises, and the honest effort that government shall become the social providence of all the people.

No social program involved any greater stress on active interference by state action. Others of the Warren group expressed the most warm sympathies with the strikers, but none exhibited this degree of contradiction as compared to previous theoretical stands.

The passion among fragments of reform elements for the organization of “leagues” of various sorts resulted in the agglomeration known as the Union Reform League, a Heywood-Andrews directed association of small groups interested in various social reforms. The U. R. L., the principal aim of which was the “blending of all shades of opinion, and the union of all Schools of Reform in one common platform,” met annually in Heywood’s home town of Princeton, Mass. from 1879 until 1882. The American and New England Labor Reform Leagues had been primarily engaged in propagation of economic reform sentiment. The new group included elements concerned with temperance, free-thought, woman suffrage, spiritualism, currency reform and trade unionism. Andrews became nominal president of the U. R. L. at its second meeting, at which time it probably reached the peak of its interest to a wide gathering of allied sympathizers.108

Most of the anarchists had by now drawn away from both Heywood and Andrews and had gathered around Tucker with the express purpose of concentrating on exposing economic evils. The resolutions of the U. R. L. nevertheless still reflected a strong anti-statist flavor. The 1881 convention adopted unanimously the following “practical measures of Reform”: woman suffrage, repeal of the obscenity statutes, repeal of laws making bible reading compulsory in the public schools, the adoption of a “new cosmopolitan language,” abolition of poll tax qualifications for voting, repeal of the license and prohibitory liquor laws, repeal of laws “taxing citizens to support war, or compelling them to do military service,” abolition of land, money and transportation monopolies,109 and an endorsement of free trade. The negative nature of most of these reforms reveal the heavy anarchist influence. The Union Reform League dissolved in 1882, and its parts drifted into new reform orbits.

Andrews, still active in New York,110 continued his sociological speculations. His dissertations before the Liberal Club received considerable publicity, since he had now become reputed for his vast learning. His prophecy of the future envisioned a single governmental unit for the world at the end of the twenty-first century, with a single world language and religious creed. This was to follow a political conflict on ideological grounds111 between “plutocracy,” the government of rich men exemplified by “the laissez-faire doctrine of the political economists, Herbert Spencer included,” and the “politarchy” of state socialism. These two compulsory forms of the “governmental idea” he saw eventually giving way before the anarchist principle, “which simply strives to throw off all governmental control, to relegate the management of all human affairs to the pure, unorganized, unregulated spontaneity of the people themselves.”112 This simplified result strongly resembled the Andrews governmental ideal of “convergent individuality,” which was an amalgamation of the free association of the anarchist and the free recognition of the leadership function as derived from Charles Fourier.

Against the twentieth century backdrop of titanic struggles between great centralized states, such prognostications have a flavor of visionary romanticism bearing little relation to reality. The position of Stephen Pearl Andrews in American sociology113 is no settled matter. The fact that the nature of much of his thought and erudition is apart from his contributions as a social thinker has made an evaluation difficult.114 The consideration at this time is with his relation to the development of American anarchism, from which he did deviate while remaining deeply attached to its basic principle of personal freedom. The American anarchist Henry Appleton declared him to be “the intellectual giant of America.” The English anarchist Henry Seymour said he was “probably the most intellectual man on this planet.” Benjamin Tucker’s estimate, probably the soundest, was: “Anarchists especially will ever remember and honor him because he has left behind him the ablest English book ever written in defense of Anarchist principles.”115 That Tucker’s followers were to claim substantially the same for him at a later time illustrates the continuity of intellectual content in the American anarchist movement.

 

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116.  See biographical sketch in Social Science, I (September 28, 1887), 2-3. A partial list of his writings can be found in Nettlau, Bibliographie, 9.

117.  Ingalls, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian in the Fields of Industrial and Social Reform, 3, 9-10, 13-14, 16-19, 21.

118.  Ingalls, Reminiscences, 11, 22. Ingalls was reluctant to discuss his early years as a preacher; “They are hardly in a line with the social, industrial and economic investigations which have engrossed my more mature thoughts,” he commented briefly. For indications of a favorable attitude toward spiritualism on his part see his article “The Power of Right,” in The Spiritual Age, I (September 12, 1875), 77-78.

119.  Reading George Henry Evans’ Young America convinced him that the “usury of land,” or ground rent, was the structure upon which the money and property systems were founded.

120.  See the short description of Ingalls as a land reformer in Lewis Masquerier, Sociology, 125.

121.  Reminiscences, 25; Commons, Documentary History, VII, 288-352; VIII, 21-78; Octavius B. Frothingham, Life of Gerrit Smith, 194.

122.  Ingalls’ particular interest in this campaign was the possible inclusion of a land limitation law in the platform and the passage of a bill similar to the Homestead Act. Reminiscences, 25-27.

Gerrit Smith received the hearty support of the land reform group, his views on the land question being hardly less radical than theirs. In an address at Troy, N.Y., April 14, 1851, he denounced land monopoly as “a crime,” while asserting that “government positively and expressly permits it. Still worse, it does itself practice it. Government is itself the great land monopolist.” His proposed resolution at the Liberty Party convention at Cazenovia, N. Y., July 3, 1849, designating land monopoly as “the most widespread of all oppressions,” was passed unanimously. Frothingham, Gerrit Smith, 182-183, 188-189. A recent interpretation of Smith has dismissed his land reform propaganda as erratic and irresponsible. See Ralph V. Harlow, Gerrit Smith, Philanthropist and Reformer (New York, 1939), 241-258.

123.  While editing a small land reform paper, The Landmark, in 1848, Ingalls spoke under the sponsorship of Gerrit Smith on this and other topics, on a tour of Madison, Cayuga and Herkimer counties in New York. Reminiscences, 28-30.

124.  Reminiscences, 38.

125.  Reminiscences, 41. It was his observation that by 1850 the economic discussion of slavery was commonplace; “Slavery should be abolished because free labor is cheaper, and would increase the wealth of the employer more rapidly.” Go where you may, this selfism meets you.” Ingalls in Spirit of the Age, II, 43. Stress is Ingalls’.

126.  Reminiscences, 27.

127.  Reminiscences, 43.

128.  Ingalls wrote a review of this book which was published in The Univercoelum of April 21 and April 28, 1849.

129.  “Any system,” he wrote, “securing a premium to capital, however small, must result in the want, degradation and servitude of one class, and in bestowing unearned wealth and power upon another . . .; the product of human labor can only be exchanged for the product of human labor.” Spirit of the Age, I, 115; II, 146-147.

130.  Dana’s articles were titled “European Socialism.” Spirit of the Age, I, 209211, 324-326, 358-359, 371-372. The now-defunct Univercoelum and the earlier Harbinger had become incorporated in this periodical.

131.  Reminiscences, 51-52.

132.  Ingalls, in Spirit of the Age, I, 243-246.

133.  Ingalls, “Method of Transition for the Consideration of the True Friends of Human Rights and Human Progress,” in Spirit of the Age, I, 385-387.

134.  Reminiscences, 56.

135.  Reminiscences, 57; Spirit of the Age, II, 56-57.

136.  Ingalls, “Method of Transition,” in Spirit of the Age, I, 387.

137.  Ingalls in Spirit of the Age, II, 203-204.

138.  Reminiscences, 57. Ingalls’ plan may also have been influenced by what he had learned concerning the Shakers, whom, like Robert Owen, he admired for their economic success and absence of exploitation of less-favored members.

139.  Reminiscences, 60, 63, 78, 86.

140.  Ingalls was a welcome addition to the group. Wrote Heywood: “After Josiah Warren and Wm. B. Greene, from no other American have we received so much genuine intellectual assistance in labor reform as from J. K. Ingalls.” The Word, VII (April, 1880), 2.

141.  The Word, II (May, 1873), 3; (September, 1873), 1-2; V (July, 1876), 1-2; IX (May, 1880), 3.

142.  The Word, V (August, 1876), 1.

143.  Ingalls, Periodical Business Crises, 7. It was his contention that the war debt had been repaid several times in interest premiums, and hinted at the possibility that the war had been paid for as it was fought, thus casting a suspicious shadow over the whole matter of war debt as generally conceived. Periodical Business Crises, 12. Lysander Spooner was arriving at much the same conclusions but independently of Ingalls. See Chapter VII, note 118.

144.  Periodical Business Crises, 2.

145.  Periodical Business Crises, 3-5.

146.  This was first published as an article in the Radical Review in February, 1878, and subsequently issued separately as a pamphlet in 1881. Citations noted are from the Radical Review.

147.  Radical Review, I. 655.

148.  Radical Review, I, 652, 654-656. It was his conviction that a group could not become inordinately rich without another becoming correspondingly poor. Like Warren it was his belief that mutual exchange of labor could not produce inordinate inequality.

149.  Radical Review, I, 653. Ingalls at this time had no objection to a government system of land distribution involving some of the features of nationalization, if it could result in a limitation upon the total acreage held by each land owner.

150.  Radical Review, I, 659.

151.  Radical Review, I, 653-654, 659-660.

152.  See The Word, X (October, 1882), 1. This was a violent attack upon the concept of government ownership, and the land policy of the United States from the time of the adoption of the Constitution onward.

153.  Ingalls was probably the first of the libertarians to write under his own name for Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty. Tucker published the famous Henry George Examined. Should Land Be Nationalized or Individualized? as a special unpaginated supplement in Liberty, II (October 14, 1882). This was later issued as a pamphlet by Heywood in 1888.

154.  See Ingalls, “Land Reform in 1848 and 1888,” in Liberty, IV (June 9, 1888), 5. Ingalls here developed his interpretation and comparison of Evans and George favorable to the former but rejecting the political methods of both.

155.  Ingalls, Social Wealth, 255-258, 263-264, 271-272.

156.  Social Wealth, 45.

157.  “Look at the question of private dominion of the land in whatever light we may, we can find it to originate in usurpation only, whether of the camp, the court or the market. Whenever such dominion excludes or deprives a single human being of his equal opportunity, it is a violation, not only of the public right, and of the social duty, but of the very principle of law and morals upon which property itself is based . . .” Ingalls, Social Wealth, 153-154.

158.  Social Wealth, 160-161, 305.

159.  Social Wealth, 272.

160.  Social Wealth, 125.

161.  Social Wealth, 68-70, 73.

162.  Social Wealth, 71, 165, 282-283.

163.  Social Wealth, 9, 40-42, 47.

164.  Social Wealth, 11, 13, 52-53, 74-75, 297.

165.  Social Wealth, 183-184.

166.  Social Wealth, 266-267, 287-289, 307.

167.  Alfred Russel Wallace, Land Nationalisation, Its Necessity and Aims. Being a Comparison of the System of Landlord and Tenant, With That of Occupying Ownership in Their Influence on the Well-being of People (London, 1882).

168.  Social Wealth, 286-300, 308-309.

169.  Ingalls was quoted from continually in Liberty. Wrote M. E. Lazarus, another land reform anarchist, “to be a pronounced anarchist, he lacks only the courage of his convictions.” Liberty, III (January 23, 1886), 8. For Ingalls’ point of view on his relations with the Tucker associates, see Reminiscences, 119-121.

170.  The Tuckerites and other mutualists criticized Ingalls for a tendency to imply that the “free land” program would induce people to abandon the use of money. Alfred B. Westrup, The New Philosophy of Money, 173-174.

171.  See Ingalls, “The Productivity of Capital,” in Social Science, I October 5, 1887), 12-13; Fair Play, II (March 2, 1890), 64-65; Fair Play, III (March, 1891), 182-184.

172.  Ingalls, Economic Equities: A Compend of the Natural Laws of Industrial Production and Exchange, 54-55.

173.  Social Wealth, 286; Economic Equities, 54, 57, 62-63; Reminiscences, 172.

174.  Ingalls, The Unrevealed Religion, 22.

175.  Unrevealed Religion, 19, 24; Fair Play, III (March, 1891), 211-214.

176.  Economic Equities, 59-60; Ingalls, Social Industry, or the Sole Source of Increase, 5, 10; Reminiscences, 169-170. Ingalls was impressed by the use of the militia in the 1877 railroad strike and the police in the Haymarket case. It was his judgment that unemployed laborers would always be enlisted as police, soldiers and militia and used in these capacities to break strikes. “It is the wage worker who is mostly responsible for our pernicious system, under which capitalism nourishes and industry pines; it is by his ballot and his bayonet by which usurpation is maintained.” Fair Play, I (January 19, 1889), 4.

177.  There is considerable biographical material of varied quality on Andrews. Older accounts, which tend to be somewhat fuller than the recent estimations, are in Apple ton’s Cyclopedia, I, 76, and National Cyclopedia, VI, 442-443. For others consult Kunitz and Haycraft, American Authors, 33; Charles T. Sprading, Liberty and the Great Libertarians, 236, and the article by Ernest Sutherland Bates and William Bristol Shaw in Dictionary of American Biography, I, 298-299.

178.  Jesse S. Reeves, American Diplomacy Under Tyler and Polk (Baltimore, 1907), 126.

179.  Stephen P. Andrews, The Phonographic Class Book (Boston, 1844); Andrews and Augustus F. Boyle, The Phonographic Reporter’s First Book (New York, 1848); Andrews and Boyle, The Phonographic Word Book Number One (New York, 1849); Andrews and Boyle, The Phonographic Reader (16 editions, Boston and New York, 1845-1850); Andrews and Boyle, The Complete Phonographic Class Book (11 editions, Boston and New York, 1845-1848).

180.  Stephen Pearl Andrews, Memorial of the Inhabitants of the United States, Praying for the Printing of the Proceedings of Congress in Phonotypy (Washington, 1850), (also published in Senate Miscellaneous Documents, 31 Cong., 1 Sess., Doc. 125); Andrews and George Batchelor, A New and Comprehensive French Instructor (New York, 1855); Andrews and Batchelor, The Practical Pronouncer and Key to Andrews and Batchelor’s New French Instructor (New York, 1856); Andrews, Discoveries in Chinese; or, the Symbolism of the Primitive Characters of the Chinese System of Writing (New York, 1854). Andrews’ interest in semantics and his own curious universal language were part of his sociological thinking and a product of the period after 1870.

181.  Voice of Industry, January 22, 1847, in Commons, Documentary History, VIII, 126. This group was an earlier affiliation of trade unions and sympathetic associates, and is not to be confused with the gatherings of the same name of a quarter century later.

Andrews later deprecated Fourierism, and pronounced it of little value, but it is probable that he never completely rejected its earlier teachings, which even found their way into his own sociology during the 70’s.

182.  Andrews sent a pre-publication copy of his Science of Society, No. 1 to Lysander Spooner, apparently their first contact, judging from the formality of the reply. Spooner remarked, “I am obliged to you for your pamphlet, and have read it. It is very able, and I think the most of it is true. I go for individualism to the last extent, and I think the time may possibly come when the rights of the individual, and the law resulting from them, will be so well understood that little government will be necessary to protect the former from encroachment.” He was not so taken with Josiah Warren’s “cost-the-limit-of-price” theory, however; “I heard a lecture on the subject by Mr. Warren a few months ago, but it did not convince me.” Spooner to Andrews, July 4, 1851, Baskette Collection. Andrews’ two writings went into six editions, appearing each year from 1851-1854, and were revived by the Tuckerites in 1888 and again in 1895. A reprinting was featured in Liberty after his death. The 1888 edition was reissued in Boston in 1970.

183.  Science of Society, (No. 1), introd., v-vi.

184.  Science of Society, (No. 1), 21-26, 63-69.

185.  Science of Society, (No. 2), 196-201, 209-211.

186.  Science of Society, (No. 2), introd., vii-viii.

187.  Science of Society, (No. 1), 39.

188.  Science of Society, (No. 2), 113.

189.  Warren’s doctrine of cooperation as explained by Andrews was very similar to Stirnerite egoism; “by co-operation . . . it meant such an arrangement of the property and industrial interests of the different Individuals of the community, that each, in pursuing his own pleasure or benefit, contributes incidentally to the pleasure or benefit of the others.” Science of Society, (No. 2), 48.

190.  Andrews, Love, Marriage and Divorce, and the Sovereignty of the Individual. A Discussion Between Henry James, Horace Greeley and Stephen Pearl Andrews, 12-13. Hereinafter cited as Discussion. See also Charles Sotheran, Horace Greeley and Other Pioneers of American Socialism (New York, 1915), 12. Andrews had first contacted the Tribune on the matter in a reply to George Ripley, whose 3½ column review of the 1852 edition of Warren’s Equitable Commerce had been published shortly before. His long answer to Ripley is reprinted in his Science of Society (1888 ed.), 153-165.

191.  Andrews’ wife was Esther B. Hussey, a graduate of the New York Female Medical College. Her practice was confined to the city’s poor and destitute for the greater part of her life. Like a great many of the professional and intellectual elements of the city in the 1850’s, she was also a spiritualist. See her obituary by Frances Rose MacKinley in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, May 27, 1871.

192.  Andrews, Discussion, 8-9.

193.  Discussion, 12.

194.  Discussion, page cited above. He describes Warren as “an obscure, plain man, one of the people, a commonsense thinker.”

195.  Discussion, 9-11.

196.  Discussion, 47.

197.  Discussion, 64.

198.  Andrews’ sociological speculations and their analogous position to those of Comte were recognized by several contemporaries. See for instance the account in Noyes, American Socialisms, 94, where Andrews is described as the American “rival” of Comte. For Edger, see Chapter III, part 2.

199.  Periodical Letter, I, 2nd Series (September, 1857), 85-89. This was later reprinted in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly of June 3, 1871. For the 1938 reprinting by the Oriole Press consult Bibliography.

200.  The Spiritual Age, I (September 12, 1857), 77.

201.  There is still considerable evidence of the influence of Fourier in writing of this kind, especially the dwelling upon the idea of order in leadership through attraction.

202.  Spiritual Age, I, 77.

203.  Andrews was still sympathetic to this settlement, and spent some time there on occasions, despite the fact that he had deprecated Fourierite phalanx types of colonization as “folly.” Science of Society, (No. 2), 178.

204.  Laura Stedman and George M. Gould, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman (2 vols. New York, 1910), I, 153-154.

205.  Stedman and Gould, Life and Letters, I, 156-159, 176-177.

206.  Andrews’ group organized a meeting place known as The Club which during the period 1854-1855 was located at 555 Broadway, where “men, women and children gathered once a week at a cost of 10 cents each, to amuse themselves and each other socially and rationally, instead of resorting to lager-beer saloons and the theatres, or more objectionable places.” Known to the general public as the “Free-Love Club,” its members were occasionally harassed, as Andrews was to describe, by “the brute instincts of an ignorant populace.” Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, June 10, 1871.

The Labadie Collection contains a brochure intended to advertise one of these lectures at the hall, at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, announcing “A Scientific Sermon by Stephen Pearl Andrews, in Exposition of Universology, Integralism and the Pantarchal Regime, as the Commonwealth or Universal Institute of Humanity; and of the general scope of the Science, with some appropriate Literary and Religious Exercises illustrative of the purposes of THE NEW CATHOLIC CHURCH.” Capitalization is reproduced from the brochure.

207.  Andrews, “The Great American Crisis,” in The Continental Monthly, V (March, 1864), 314.

208.  Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, June 3, June 10, July 15, August 5, August 19, September 2, 1871.

209.  Andrews’ inconsistency in this matter was evident a few years later in the following dismissal of his first master: “Fourier’s scheme had not one word even in relation to the direct improvement of the individual. It was a grand machine for grinding out an improved humanity from an improved mill of conditions. And just here it failed.” The Word, II (March, 1874), 3.

210.  Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, September 2, 1871.

211.  This book was sold to private subscribers, being subsidized by a friend of Andrews, Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson. Subscribers included David Dudley Field, Peter Cooper, Edward L. Youmans, John Swinton and former Vice President Benjamin F. Wade. Universology, 756; John T. Trowbridge, “Reminiscence of the Pantarch,” in The Independent, LV, 499.

212.  Mr. Warren indeed admits the Counter-principle of Leadership, or Individuality of Lead, . . . but he makes so little of it in the comparison with the Divergent or liberating operation of Individuality, that his name may well be put as the representative “par excellence” of his profoundly Radical Principle of Socialism.

Comte, on the other hand, with no attempt even at any adequate discrimination, leans, by his natural attitudes, wholly to the opposite extreme. He explicitly denies Rights to the Individual in Society, altogether. He affirms that Society alone has Rights, and the Individual has Duties to perform, only. . . . The Collective Interests of Humanity, and the absolute devotion of the Individual to them, is insisted upon in such immense preponderance, that I have chosen his name to stand representatively for this Counter-Principle of Convergent Individuality. Universology, 31-32. Stress and capitals quoted from original text.

213.    For the failure of such sociologists as Lester Ward and Charles Cooley to specifically mention the sources of their ideas, and the probability of heavy borrowing from Andrews, among others, see Luther L. and Jessie Bernard, Origins of American Sociology: The Social Science Movement in the United States, 838-840. For further analysis of Warren, consult Universology, 30, 485.

214.    See article in Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, February 8, 1873 relating early associations of the two men.

Beecher, a notable opponent of Mrs. Woodhull, whom he accused of moral turpitude, was met on his own ground by a widely-broadcast accusation of improper relations with the wife of Theodore Tilton, a prominent parishioner of the well-known clergyman. Beecher’s moral campaign against the Wood-hull group declined sharply a short while thereafter.

215.  Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, April 18, May 9, May 16, 1874.

216.  Discussion, 108, 112.

217.  The Index, VII, 291, 333, 375-376, 429. A review by Andrews of Tucker’s translation of What Is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, the famous and highly controversial anarchist work of Proudhon, brought about most of the argument. For Warren’s last days in the movement, see The Word, II (January, 1874), 2; The Index, V, 198199, 260-261.

218.  This was first printed in the August, 1877 issue of the Radical Review, and subsequently published as a pamphlet in 1881. Page citations are from the first printing.

219.  Radical Review, I, 294-295.

220.  Radical Review, I, 297.

221.  “. . . equity, in establishing prices, grants nothing on the ground of natural superiority, therein concurring with the principles of fair dealing,. . . it will be found that the effect is quietly to force everybody into their true places; . . . Under the principle the best endowed and most efficient labor comes into competition with inferior labor in each special branch, not, as now, at a higher price, but absolutely at a lower price. He who should have the greatest natural fitness for a particular kind of work, having greater facility in it, will—with some exceptions only—have also the greatest attraction or fondness for that kind of industry. His estimate of its intensity will therefore be less than that of other men . . . it will not be as hard work for him as for them, and, therefore, his price will be less, . . . so that to be driven out of the labor market only means being transferred to something better.” Radical Review, I, 305-307.

222.  The Index, VIII, 377.

223.  A report of these conventions, with extended attention to details, is that by Ezra Heywood, The Evolutionists: Being a Condensed Report of the Principles, Purposes and Methods of the Union Reform League. For lists of speakers, distinguished visitors and interested correspondents involved in the three conventions see work cited above, 3-8.

224.  Prison reform, “theological reform,” and an anti-vaccination plank also occupied discussion and approval at this time. Heywood, The Evolutionists, 8, 14-15.

225.  See Tucker’s comment concerning Andrews’ recent reproach of the plumbline anarchists for their “dread of order” in Liberty, I (October, 1881), 1.

226.  New York Home Journal, August 20, 1884. For Andrews’ universal language, and his investigations into the meaning of words, see his following works: Primary Grammar of Alwato (New York, 1877); Primary Synopsis of Universology and Alwato (New York, 1877); The Alphabet of Philosophy (New York, 1881); Ideological Etymology; or a New Method in the Study of Words (New York, 1881); The One Alphabet for the Whole World (New York, 1881).

227.  Truth, I (June, 1884), 42-44. It is interesting to note that Andrews compared Lester Ward to Comte in evaluating their contributions to social thinking, he himself having been the object of comparison to the French sociologist by John Humphrey Noyes fifteen years earlier.

228.  See especially Luther and Jessie Bernard, Origins of American Sociology, Chapters XII, XXII, XXIII.

229.  “Observer,” in the Boston News, spoke of him as “an iceberg of a brain,” “as remarkable an heresiarch as Brigham Young, and has doubtless been more mischievous.” Trowbridge, a personal acquaintance, recalled him as “a type of pure intellect . . . but a colossal egotist and sterile pedant.” The Word, IV (May, 1875), 1; Trowbridge, “Reminiscence of the Pantarch,” 497.

230.  The Anarchist, I (June, 1885), 2; I (August, 1886), 1; Liberty, III (June 19, 1886), 2.

• 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 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.
• 117 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.
• 118 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.
• 119 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.
• 120 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.
• 121 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.
• 122 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.
• 123 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.
• 124 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.
• 125  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.
• 126  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).
• 127  “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.
• 128  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.
• 129The 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.
• 130The 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.
• 131It 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.
• 132Owen 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.
• 133Having 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.
• 134Having 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.
• 135Having 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.
• 136Warren 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.
• 137Warren 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.
• 138Warren 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.
• 139Warren 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.
• 140Warren 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:
• 141Warren 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:
• 142Warren 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:
• 143Warren 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:
• 144Although 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:
• 145Although 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:
• 146One 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.
• 147Owen 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.
• 148Owen 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.
• 149Owen 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.
• 150Warren 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.
• 151While 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.
• 152While 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.
• 153Warren’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:
• 154Warren’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:
• 155Warren’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:
• 156Warren’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:
• 157Using this concept of individualism, then it appeared logical to him that interests, responsibilities and actions all had to be confined to this level.
• 158To 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.
• 159As 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.
• 160Josiah 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.
• 161The 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.
• 162Thus 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.
• 163The 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.
• 164The 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.
• 165The 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.
• 166Often 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.
• 167Warren 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.
• 168The 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.
• 169This 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.
• 170It 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.
• 171Warren’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.
• 172Warren’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.
• 173Warren, 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.”
• 174Warren, 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.”
• 175Warren 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.
• 176Warren 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.
• 177The 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.
• 178The 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.
• 179Warren’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.
• 180Warren’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.
• 181The 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.
• 182The 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.
• 183The 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.
• 184A 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.
• 185A 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.
• 186Warren 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.
• 187Warren 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.
• 188Warren 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.
• 189At 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.
• 190At 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.
• 191At 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.
• 192The 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.
• 193Owen 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.
• 194Owen’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.
• 195Owen’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.
• 196Owen’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.
• 197Turning 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.”
• 198Turning 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.”
• 199Turning 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.”
• 200Warren 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.
• 201Warren 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.
• 202Warren 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.
• 203Regardless 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.
• 204Regardless 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.
• 205Regardless 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.
• 206Equitable 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:
• 207The 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.
• 208In 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.
• 209In 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.
• 210In 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.
• 211In 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.
• 212In 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:
• 213In 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:
• 214In 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:
• 215Warren 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.
• 216Warren 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.
• 217Warren 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.
• 218Warren 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.
• 219Warren 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.
• 220Warren 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.”
• 221Warren 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.”
• 222The 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.
• 223The 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.
• 224The 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.
• 225The 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.
• 226The 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.
• 227The 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.
• 228The 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.
• 229The 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.
• 230One 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.