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| From the archives of The Memory Hole |
Individualist Anarchism: Re-Radicalization in Post-War America
The following is a chapter from James J. Martin's seminal work, Men Against the State, covering some of the consequences of the American ‘war between the states’ in the 19th century and their effects on individualist anarchist thinking—at least among its more prominent proponents. “War is the health of the state,” as Randolph Bourne later observed, and indeed this fact was rather salient in the post-Civil War period as the effects of wartime measures transformed into permanent features of the socio-politico-economic landscape. This led to the emergence of a new breed of American individualist anarchists inspired by their practical-minded forebears, but opposed to the state on a more fundamental philosophical level. Their literature is the legacy of American individualist anarchism in its incipient stages.CHAPTER V
Heralds of the Transition to Philosophical Egoism I
[Josiah] Warren's declining years found a revival of interest
in his economic and social ideas. A new group of agents in the propaganda
of native anarchism was now upon the scene. The emphasis had by this time
broadened to include the exponents of other elements of libertarian reform,
and the stress was now to manifest itself as a more intellectual rather
than purely practical development. There still remained a strong inclination
toward expression in the tradition of the second quarter of the century,
but the dislocations in all aspects of life produced by the Civil War extended
to the radical front as well as to the structure of the conventional domestic
economy. The war enormously accentuated centralization of manufacturing,
commerce and finance. It hastened the disposal of the national domain. It
increased the scope of governmental functions in a variety of ways, which
opponents of the state sensed rather than felt. All these incidents contributed
toward the creation of the social and economic circumstances which were
to become the new battle ground of American opposition to the state.
The literature of anarchism now incorporated the efforts of not only Warrenite
disciples such as Stephen Pearl Andrews and Ezra Heywood but also more distant
and independent associates, William B. Greene, J. K. Ingalls and Lysander
Spooner, whose anti-statist sentiments took divergent paths but retained
the same spirit. The dozens of books and pamphlets published by this small
group of men constitute one of the lost branches of American literature
and form the basis for a unique incident in the social history of nineteenth
century United States.
The consummation of the abolitionist movement released into other areas
of reform a group of earnest men seeking another cause, unconvinced that
the destruction of chattel slavery had brought about the millennium. The
new group of anarchists had all participated in the fight against negro
servitude, in varying degrees, having been allied to the Garrisonian school.
The purely negative doctrines of no-government which had permeated the non-political
wing of the anti-slavery movement undoubtedly influenced all these men.
Nevertheless, pre-Civil War America had been the scene of tremendous economic
unrest, the bloom of Fourierite socialism being but one of the forms in
which it had expressed itself. Thus the acquaintance with economic issues
tempered the moralism of abolition in the case of the anti-state libertarians,
who found
103
| 104 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
little satisfaction in pure negation and avoidance of embarrassing material
questions now brought into relief and side-stepped by the abolitionists
as a whole. They had long been aware of the distress of the "free"
Northern worker in the pre-war era, and now sought the cause of his misery
in the economic structure of society. Going back to elementary principles
of political economy, Warren's successors indicted the state in a more elaborate
manner, tracing the origins of practically all derangement within the material
community to politically-created artificial advantages.
Although not allied in any formal sense, the exponents of the "free
society" remained in accord on basic principles which Warren had attempted
to demonstrate with varying degrees of success and satisfaction to himself.
Their concern centered around an economic order in which the producer would
obtain the full total of his production, the development of a system of
exchange geared to the cost of production in labortime, and utilization
of land and raw materials on the strict basis of occupation and actual employment.
Convinced of the justice of such objectives, the anarchists proposed to
prove that such an order was possible from natural conditions, and that
the machinery of government succeeded in merely upsetting that which found
its own level without special interference or legislation.
Having declared their position, their battle line was drawn up against the
specific evils which they designated as the causes of disaffection within
the economic community. In their ideal economy, which involved production
for use, and free competition so as to find the lowest possible production
cost, the existence of anything approximating monopoly and special privilege
of all kinds constituted their primary target, and their ultimate attack
upon the state grew out of location of the privilege-granting power in the
group in control of the machinery of the state. Thus they designated as
legislative favoritism the acts of granting exclusive rights to the ownership
of land and raw materials, the legal sanction of a particular commodity
as the only permissible tender, and the creation of more subtle forms of
privilege concealed in tariffs, patents, and copyrights. With the erection
of small bodies of special interests whose efforts in the future would thus
be devoted toward preserving such perquisites, the anarchists tended to
look with undisguised skepticism upon all efforts to repair the continual
malfunctioning of the economic system by piecemeal legislation. The resulting
temporary expedients might prove highly gratifying to politicians and to
supporters of the business world masquerading as "reformers,"
they observed, but as far removed from basic principles as before the changes
were put into operation.
Differences of opinion existed among the anarchists as to the relative importance
of the evils which they saw as productive of most of the distemper of human
society. For the most part they persisted in bringing their ideas before
the literate public as individuals, although two
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 105 |
vigorous attempts at gathering their efforts under unified auspices occurred during the 40 years immediately following the termination of the war. The first of these, Ezra Heywood's publishing activities, which used Princeton, Massachusetts as its headquarters, spread out over the 25 year period from 1869 until 1893. In many ways it furnished the stimulus to Benjamin Tucker, whose better known venture in the propagation of anarchism spanned over a quarter century, from 1881 to 1908. Both able writers in their own right, their productions cannot easily be separated from their functions as clearing houses for those of their intellectual associates.
1. Ezra Heywood, Pamphleteer
The return of Josiah Warren to Boston early in 1863 and his subsequent influence
upon segments of the radicals of the city and its vicinity has been noted.
It was in this same year that he was to meet the young Garrisonian abolitionist
Ezra Heywood and turn the latter's efforts into the more obscure channel
of radical economic thought. Heywood, a native of Westminster, Massachusetts,
and the recipient of two academic degrees from Brown University,1 had become
associated with William Lloyd Garrison in February, 1858,2 entering into
the anti-slavery movement in Boston with considerable vigor. Having previously
abandoned training for the ministry, he disassociated himself from the cause
of negro freedom with the outbreak of hostilities in 1861, being also a
nonresistant and an opponent of violence.3 The outbreak of bloodshed ended
his support of the Northern cause, although he continued to deprecate slavery,
and inconsistently, to rejoice in later years at its destruction by the
means which he most deplored.
A man without a cause, his meeting with Warren and the reading of the latter's
True Civilization brought about his conversion to the search for
the cause of the general phenomenon of poverty. Destined to exceed the master
in degree of extremity in his proposals and, on two occasions
| 106 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
in particular, to draw from him severe expressions of criticism, Heywood
never was to renounce his devotion and respect for Josiah Warren. Twenty-five
years after their first acquaintance Heywood was to pronounce Warren "the
Thomas Paine of coming Socialism," and to assert his work "the
most influential book issued since 1840 in the United States or Europe."4
Heywood was unwilling to remain with Warren, or to take any part in the
last attempts at colonization which were being contemplated at Cliftondale.
The rising wind of unrest had begun to sweep through the industrial workers
of the land, heavily-industrialized Massachusetts being concerned no less
than any other area. Into the confusion of ideas and suggestions for remedial
action, Heywood was content to project the philosophy of Warren's decentralized
free economy. Leaving Boston, he went to Worcester, where his influence
among the radical intellectuals was soon evident. Meetings of like-minded
thinkers resulted in the formation in August, 1867, of the Worcester Labor
Reform League,5 the first of a large number of groups of the unconventionally-minded
which Heywood was to front, and the forerunner of two larger and more important
organizations of similar purpose.
The bright promise of unionization drew the support of this band for a time.
William Sylvis' National Labor Union, the first noteworthy post Civil War
labor organization, appeared to point the way during their first year. The
Worcester group unofficially affiliated for a time, Heywood attending the
second session as a delegate at the "New York Congress" of the
N. L. U. in New York, September 21, 1868.6 Association with Warren's ideas
had already weakened any faith he may have had as to the permanence of any
gain effected through combination of laborers, however, and there is no
evidence that his sympathy with the cause of working men found any expression
at this time.7
Before members of the Worcester associates, later that same year, he began
to sketch the philosophy which he had been gradually assimilating. In an
address later published under the title The Labor Party,8 he expressed
many of the convictions which were to be found in native anarchist literature
for the next half century. Heywood still spoke the language of political
action, although condemning governmental policies
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 107 |
as responsible for much of the disjointed relations between capital and labor, heightening class consciousness, bitterness, and violence. The address is important more as a document in the literature of industrial protest than as a philosophical treatise. Thus he asserted:9
No one will deny that labor is entitled to its earnings, and that it is the duty, both of individuals and society, . . . to render unto all men and women according to their works. Let us also bear in mind that class rule, the centralizing of political or financial power in the hands of few, to the injury of many, is wrong, and that law . . . should cover with the shield of its protection the whole people, especially defenseless workers. It is the violation or these simple, self-evident truths which provokes the widespread, profound and ominous agitation called the labor movement.
Agitation for "labor reform," he pointed
out, was evidence of deep and widespread discontent growing out of "violated
rights and interests" and a situation in which the "producing
classes" were being economically depressed. It was reasonable to assume,
said Heywood, that a society in which those who created the wealth but failed
to enjoy their proper share of it was 'wrong side up," and the labor
reform movement was a move in the direction of setting it aright.
He scoffed at supporters of the status quo, who saw no evidence of the exercise
of tyranny on the part of capital, and who brought up the matter of the
free contract with reference to laborers. This argument was no longer valid.
Capital controlled land, machinery, steam power, waterfalls, ships, railways,
and above all, money and public opinion, and was in a position to wait out
recalcitrancy at its leisure. The press quietly ignored the driving down
of wages, he noticed:10
But if labor, obedient to a sterner necessity, demands more pay, the air swarms with "strike," "dictation," "force," "riot," "insurrection," and many other epithets of rebuke . . .
Nor did the adverse sentiment end here;11". . . nine sermons out of ten take the side of capital against labor." Heywood did not subscribe to the theory of inevitable class conflict. He traced the source of all the evils to legislation, primarily through the creation of special interests by monopoly grants and by exercise of the taxing power:12
Government is a northeast wind, drifting property into a few aristocratic heaps, at the expense of altogether too much democratic bare ground. Through cunning legislation, . . . privileged classes are allowed to steal largely according to law.
| 108 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
The presence of special interests, "the third house at Washington,"
with their influence upon congressional committees, indirect taxation, creation
of tariffs, enormous land grant monopolies, and a money system in the hands
of a small group of favored bankers, these were the primary sins which he
charged to the ledger of the government.
Torn between distrust of political action13 and loyalty to the general plan
of action approved by the National Labor Union, Heywood's review of proposed
remedies resulted in a patchwork of anarchist economics and piecemeal expedients
favored by union councils. He was in full sympathy with such issues as reduction
in the hours of work, close cooperation between capital and labor in the
production and distribution of wealth, direct taxation, low interest rates,
and "honest money," all of which he conceded were worthy "animating
principles" behind the formation of a political labor party.14
His declaration for free banking and a labor currency, a matter which he
and the Worcester faction had considered independently, unaware of its other
champions, indicated the direction in which their energies were to be henceforth
expended:15
Gold has served the plundering instincts of the stock exchange too well; it is too efficient a weapon . . . to be longer tolerated as the money of a free and enlightened people.... Let us have an American currency--perhaps a day's labor will he the unit of reckoning . . . but the least we can demand is that money shall represent the visible results of labor; that at least two dollars in real estate shall be pledged by mortgage for every paper dollar issued.
Misgivings as to the efficacy of political action soon assumed the proportions of complete rejection in the following year. A meeting in Boston in January, 1869, of a larger group of New England intellectuals allied to Heywood in sentiment resulted in the beginning of the New England Labor Reform League. This was a group of radicals which swung away from conventional activities in behalf of labor, prompted by the deterioration of the National Labor Union and the death of Sylvis. Within a short time, the policies of the League became wholeheartedly anarchistic, resulting in its moving to the extreme left and remaining there for its 25 years of existence. One of the important factors resulting
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 109 |
in this move was the incorporation within its ranks of the services of William
B. Greene. Greene was a former clergyman and Union officer, for many years
known for his radical writings on the subjects of government and finance,
and a personal friend of the French anarchist P. J. Proudhon.
Spurred by the support of Greene, the native anarchist propaganda front
swung into action in a determined fashion. Heywood moved to Princeton and
established what became known as the Co-operative Publishing Company, the
center of anti-statist publications for over a decade. He issued with the
collaboration of Greene, the Declaration of Sentiments of the N.
E. L. R. L. This brief document was written in an intense style, embracing
the declarations of Greene and Warren, as well as his own, on anarchist
political economy. As an indictment of the existing order of American society
it has few equals in native radical literature of any shade. The partially-utopian
tenor of the principal objective of the League, "abolition of class
laws and false customs, whereby legitimate enterprise is defrauded by speculative
monopoly, and the reconstruction of government on the basis of justice and
reciprocity,”16 shielded a number of far more specific condemnations of
industrial], financial and governmental practices and policies destructive
to the degree of freedom insisted upon by anarchism. In an economic sense,
little was ever said thereafter which succeeded in making a significant
addition to this pronunciamento :17
Free contracts, free money, free markets, free transit, and free land--by discussion, petition, remonstrance, and the ballot, to establish these articles of faith as a common need, and a commonright, we avail ourselves of the advantages of associate effort . . .
summed up the program of the League, and in distinctive language Heywood established the theoretical basis upon which these convictions were founded. Land, including all mineral, animal and vegetable categories as they existed in nature were declared to be held in common;18 "property, as an original motive power, earns nothing," logically reducing the matter of price to labor cost, a stand in complete accord with Warren.19 The phenomenon of poverty, widespread and increasing among the "laboring classes," was no inseparable concomitant of civilized society, doomed to be thus by some inscrutable force, but grew out of "the claim
| 110 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
to own and sell what one has not earned."20 Thus developed the familiar
system of doing business, which he condemned as "a species of piracy,
wherein there is not only no intention to render equivalent for equivalent,
but studied effort to get the largest possible amount of another's service
or property, for the least possible return." He thus proscribed the
business system as a "science of overreaching," which gradually
served to absolve persons of any moral responsibility, fostered fraud, and
promoted thereby the belief that honesty was an impossibility. The logical
outcome was thought to be the embedding of the notion that poverty, crime,
and war were perennial "necessary evils."
What were the devices by which a portion of society made a living without
working? Heywood saw them as the well-entrenched and legally sanctioned
features of economics,--rent, profit and interest, when they represented
neither "work done or risk incurred," and he demanded that they
be abolished. To "make money otherwise than by earning it is the business
of counterfeiters," was his scathing comment with relation to their
ultimate results. The declaration did not explain how the League anarchists
arrived at such conclusions. Payment of interest over and above the face
value of a given debt was denounced, and full individual responsibility
for all contracts entered into demanded. It re-asserted the demand that
free banking be permitted, and that the monopoly of banking be destroyed,
thus obviating necessity of the usury laws.21
The declaration closed with a statement of other aims of the N.E.L.R.L.:
removal of tariffs; provision for free public markets in the centers of
commerce where transactions might be carried on in much the manner of the
Owenite Labor Exchanges,22 with the use of labor note currency, and removal
of the express, railroad and telegraphic lines from monopoly ownership so
that their services might be furnished to patrons at cost. This was expected
to occur as a consequence of free competition carried to its logical conclusion.
Heywood's first faltering and exploratory adventures in the material philosophy
of native anarchism, with its emphasis on free competition and access to
all raw materials and the exchange of goods on the basis of cost as nearly
equated as possible with labor time spent in production, was followed by
a flood of small paper-bound books from the Princeton press under his authorship.
Featured by short, terse titles and reinforced with quotations from numerous
authorities in the field of political economy, these booklets contributed
a substantial boost to the intellectual propaganda of the movement which
the League began to develop. Castigation of the government as the fountainhead
of economic disorder grew in intensity thereafter, the Heywood writings
furnishing the stimulus for
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 111 |
the classic phrasing of the Tucker group a generation later. Yours Or
Mine, published in 1869, and Hard Cash, five years later, contained
the germ of his economic and political anti-statist thought. These were
accompanied by an edition of Greene's Mutual Banking under the League's
sponsorship in 1870, followed a short while later by the famous Uncivil
Liberty. In this Heywood stated his unorthodox views on the woman's
rights question, a matter to which he later devoted the major part of his
energies.
Yours Or Mine attempted to solve the problem of property ownership.
It was an investigation of the basis upon which property was held and the
reasons why it was inequitably distributed. The labor reform movement should
seek "fundamental equity," he said, and not become another "assault
on vested interests," a "raid of the have-nothings upon the have-somethings;"23
The origins of property became lost in the origins of society itself, the
source of derivation being obscure from the point of view of the political
economist.24 Heywood believed that occupancy and use were the real valid
titles to ownership, despite the fact that society acquiesced in other claims
to ownership in the belief that such deference performed some benefit to
the 'general welfare." However, property built up as a result of the
profit process he declared inadmissible to the discussion of equity, with
the exception of "work done, or risk incurred." Profit-taking
was an injustice which ranked second only to legalizing titles to absolute
ownership of land or raw materials. The latter he denounced as "the
most gigantic fraud ever perpetrated by human avarice," and "the
first and most fruitful source of speculative accumulation."25 Though
sanctioned by religion, literature, and public opinion, he believed the
status of both was located in and enforced by government,26 but which made
them none the less false. The resale of land he considered a kind of "stealing,"
when it involved profit as a result of "rise of values." Monopoly,
and not "society" was responsible for the rise of land values,
he asserted, a point which the anarchists stressed in their critique of
Henry George in the pamphleteering of the 80's.
Concerning the item of rent, Heywood entered a rather novel argument. Property
was an artificial creation, he said, and as such had no inherent power of
increase. The owner of a house had no right to rent
| 112 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
once the building had paid for itself, beyond the cost of the labor in transferring,
insurance, and repair of natural deterioration. It was not fair to figure
rent as a one way proposition. A house once paid for, when returned by the
lessee after the period of occupation in original condition, not only was
not subject to payment of rent, but was actually due a recompense. Heywood
reasoned that if empty, natural decay would have occasioned the owner substantial
repair costs with no revenue being received during this untenanted interim.
A renter who returned property in its original condition was worthy of as
much consideration as was the owner. This standard was equally applicable
to all goods when loaned, he insisted, as all wealth was perishable to a
greater or lesser degree.27
If absolute ownership of land began the process of progressive inequality
of wealth, the institution of an 'exclusive" currency as a cause was
not far behind. Interest, like rent, was to Heywood nothing else than another
tax on labor. It was made possible only by the ability of a few to control
money:28
Since money is the common measure of products, and exchanges must be made in the accepted currency, it is apparent that if speculation control this medium, dictating its nature, amount, and value, they are masters of both labor and trade, and can tax us on the chance to do business, and also for the privilege of living.
Heywood called legal tender "class currency," since it did not represent all the property in the nation, as he felt it should, but only the property of those who issued it.29 It was useless to oppose high rates of interest, Heywood said, while defending low rates. All payment beyond labor and risk was no better than extortion. It was no more consistent to support some interest-taking than it was to hold that slavery was wrong in ten states but right and constitutional in two or three. "Interest must be adjudged crime in the court of conscience," he pronounced, "and the right to meddle with it carries with it the right to abolish it altogether.... Since all equitable exchange is simply exchange of services, interest, being the monopoly price of money, should be an outlaw in economical science."30 Heywood applied the same reasoning
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 113 |
to the national debt. It was his contention that interest payments on the
debt constituted an installment upon the principal, and that the debt was
no longer valid once its face had been paid in interest. Carrying over such
taxation as was represented by a national debt and imposing it upon succeeding
generations was actually the maintenance of a system of involuntary servitude.31
By the time Heywood published Hard Cash, his acquaintance with radical
literature included the violently anti-government pamphlets of Lysander
Spooner as well as the economic treatises of Warren and Greene, his views
reflecting the No Treason32 series of the former to a marked degree.
In many ways it was the most extreme of all native anarchist writings to
come from the Princeton press.
Heywood's incursion into the field of relative values was made primarily
as an assault upon the limited commodity basis of money and as a plea for
the free currency of the mutual bank. Anything that had exchangeable value
was money, and property had exchangeable value; hence all property was money,
and governmental decrees were of no
import in the face of this actuality. Gold and silver owed their use as
a money to their value as property and not to any other supposed value.
However, if two men chose to pay their debts in other "values,"
the actual bills used mattered little as long as they represented tangibles,
regardless of the standard which was used to express them.33
"Capitalists object to trade unions of working people," he observed
laconically, "but there is a trades-union of moneylenders of infinitely
greater, more oppressive and fraudulent power, than any combination ever
devised among working people."34 He was under no misconceptions as
to the influence of such ideas as his and those of the Labor Reform League
among financiers, in spite of the vigor of the convictions expressed; ".
. . despotism holds almost undisputed sway in finance, scoffing at dissent
as puerility and patronizing equity as the whim of visionary reformers."35
Heywood was sure that a national currency system was not the answer to the
needs of commerce. The state as the sole issuer of money was a prospect
that he did not entertain with any enthusiasm,36 since he no longer considered
the "government" as an abstraction, but
| 114 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
as a group of very real men whom he saw silently acquiring control of this
new and powerful financial arm. It was for this reason that he reproached
the remnants of the National Labor Union37 for its espousal of the national
currency plan of Edward Kellogg. Other aspects of the activities of unionization,
including the eight hour law campaign, he looked upon as "well-meant
protests against existing abuses, and serviceable in their way," but
he remained devoted to the idea of an industrial age of freedom under a
system of "free land and free money."
The influence of Ezra Heywood's writings is hard to determine accurately.
Despite the fact that some of his pamphlets sold from eighty to a hundred
thousand copies, it is apparent from his style and vocabulary that his efforts
were directed to a level of intelligence and comprehension far above average.
His importance as a catalyst in radical circles in the 70's, however, cannot
be wholly ignored. It was his tireless work as corresponding secretary that
kept the New England Labor Reform League in existence. The League held bi-annual
meetings, generally in Boston but once in a while in such Massachusetts
cities as New Bedford and Framingham, for 24 years after the original gathering
in January, 1869. It gradually became dominated by anarchist thought, but
its activities continued to attract many elements of the labor and intellectual
radical fronts, and maintained relations with Susan B. Anthony's National
Woman's Suffrage Association and the National Labor Union for a few years.
Prior to the 1872 election the N. E. L. R. L. broke with these organizations,38
mainly through Heywood's insistence, but sympathy with individuals from
diverse bodies quite distant from the anti-state partisans was evident in
almost all its undertakings.39 John Orvis, leader of the Sovereigns of Industry,
became its president in 1873. Succeeding meetings were attended by such
persons as Bronson Alcott, Lysander Spooner, Greene, and Charles T. Fowler.
Although taking little part in the formalities during the early years, Heywood
was always present, and acquired a reputation for his many resolutions setting
forth individualist doctrines. His speeches had some
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 115 |
of their old abolitionist flavor, and the exuberant and sensational declarations
they contained brought upon him the upbraiding of the daily press, especially
in Boston. The Post characterized the speeches at the 1873 convention
of May 25 and 26 as "levelling harangues," while the Globe
considered their program one of "social incendiarism:" The Advertiser
described the League itself as "distemper of reform," and all
condemned its program as encouraging the self-consciousness of the "workmen"
and serving to set them apart as an "exclusive class."40
Heywood himself was unaffected by adverse criticism, recalling to his listeners
and readers that he had been previously labeled a fanatic and incendiarist
while associated with Garrison. At the convention in New Bedford in the
fall of 1873 he declared that labor reform was a part of the old struggle
against chattel slavery. Speculation, rent, interest, and dividends had
now taken the place of the lash as the means of depriving laborers of their
rightful earnings. "The labor movement is not a struggle for a ten
or an eight hour law, a theory of finance or cooperation merely, but an
effort to make equity the ruling principle of business and politics.”41
The N. E. L. R. L. began to attract the attention of non-New Englanders
soon after its meetings received notice in the nation's press. The League
was intended to be local in character but Heywood undertook to bring to
its support all potential adherents. Plans for a New York convention of
intellectuals were made which culminated in a three day gathering in May,
1871. The American Labor Reform League was launched at this meeting, and
henceforth met annually in New York. lt included many shades of native radical
opinion, but was dominated by the New England anarchists until 1893. The
A. L. R. L. was an eclectic gathering of non-political radicals, in many
ways reflecting the confusion and indecision of similar independent groups
in the face of a trend toward more centralization in all aspects of American
life. The trend was one which advocates of various schemes of social simplification
were well aware of, but which they were unable to exert influence upon in
any appreciable manner.
The slate of officers elected at the 1872 convention indicates the degree
of heterogeneity which the League meeting in New York encompassed. Greene,
an anarchist, became president. The vice presidents were Orvis of the Sovereigns
of Industry, the Fourierite socialist Albert Brisbane, and the feminist
Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Heywood remained as the omnipresent corresponding
secretary, while Stephen Pearl Andrews, Victoria Woodhull, and the old land
reformers J. K. Ingalls, Lewis Masquerier and Henry Beeney all held honorary
posts.42 During the next few years a variety of other reform representatives
became
| 116 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
affiliated with the A. L. R. L. in one capacity or another. These included
the Owenite socialist John Francis Bray, the labor leader A. W. St. John,
and another representative of the Evans school of land reformers and former
associate of Josiah Warren, William Rowe.43
The cross-current of opinion stirred up in the meetings of the N. E. L.
R. L. and wide correspondence in response to his libertarian pamphlets brought
Heywood into action on a third and eventually much more widely known aspect
of anarchist propaganda. This was as editor of a periodical devoted to spreading
the ideas of the men with whom he became associated as a result of his other
interests. In May, 1872, Heywood issued the first number of The Word,
a four page monthly sheet, bearing the subtitle "A Monthly Journal
of Reform." It was intended to be an organ in which views of the members
of the two Reform Leagues could be expressed, regardless of whether or not
they adhered to Heywood's economic and social philosophy. He listed as contributors,
William B. Greene, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Josiah Warren, John Orvis, Victoria
Woodhull, Albert Brisbane, John Humphrey Noyes, Stephen Pearl Andrews, William
Denton, Frederick William Evans, Wendell Phillips, and Henry Ward Beecher.
The policy of the paper was summed up in this prospectus:44
THE WORD favors the abolition of speculative income, of woman's slavery, and war government; regards all claims to property not founded on a labor title as morally void, and asserts the free use of land to be the inalienable privilege of every human being on having the right to own or sell only his service impressed upon it. Not by restrictive methods, but through freedom and reciprocity, THE WORD seeks the extinction of interest, rent, dividends, and profit, except as the represent work done; the abolition of railway, telegraphic, banking, trades-union and other corporations charging more than actual cost for values furnished, and the repudiation of all so-called debts the principal whereof has been paid in the form of interest.
Heywood's paper failed to keep the celebrities listed above as steady contributors. It soon gained a reputation as a radical sheet, however, and enjoyed wide circulation, with subscribers in every state in the Union, Europe and even in South Africa.45 Each issue carried an impressive list of letters to the editor on a wide variety of subjects occasioned by discussion in previous issues. A separate department of the paper, bearing the heading "The Opposition," carried full comments of Heywood's critics in the daily press. This was an unusual policy, in view of the marked sensitivity of the radical movement as a whole to adverse criti-
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 117 |
cism. The labor policies of the Reform Leagues tended to stress more and
more the uncompromising economic views of their anarchist members, while
The Word began to assume the appearance of a personal organ for the
expression of the Heywood stand on all matters pertinent to the radical
movement. Despite this trend there continued to be much controversial material
in the paper, and many of Heywood's personal friends and fellow anarchists
used its pages to bitterly oppose his stands on some things.
In the first issue of the paper, Heywood warmly approved the declarations
of the International Workingmen's Association at its gatherings in Belgium
and Switzerland, especially those which called upon the members everywhere
to "obliterate" nationalism and "abolish" patriotism,
which he called "the most barbarous and stupid of virtues." He
sounded one note of disapproval, however, reflecting the bitter dispute
which had already split the anarchist and socialist factions in Europe:
"It is not pleasant to see Dr. Marx and other leaders of this great
and growing fraternity lean so strongly toward compulsory policies. If the
International would succeed it must be true to its bottom idea--voluntary
association in behalf of our common humanity."46
The following month the stamp of approval was placed upon a measure in direct
opposition to anarchist principles. This was the proposal of John H. Keyser
for a graduated income and estate tax ranging from one-half of one per cent
on incomes of $5000, to 50% on everything above $5 million.47 He followed
this with an attack upon philanthropy, in which he questioned the basis
of all large fortunes and the apparent magnanimity of their possessors:48
Where did the George Peabodys, the Peter Coopers, and others of the alms-giving class of philanthropists get the money which they presume to "give" away as their own? . . . The "poor" whom these philanthropists become so conspicuously distinguished by befriending are really the creators of the wealth they humbly receive as a gift; and, if equity prevailed, their now acknowledged "benefactors" might themselves be subjects of "charity." To alleviate suffering is praiseworthy, but to assist in creating in manifold forms the misery one gets credit for assuaging is a "deed" which . . . cannot be approved of.
His stand on the land question, which already was under fire from his erstwhile teachers, Warren and Greene, found a companion ground of disagreement through his insertion in The Word of the ultra-feminist point of view on behalf of Victoria Woodhull and her protagonists, which
| 118 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
included her sister Tennie Claflin. The core of their propaganda was a frontal
attack on the institution of marriage as one lacking justice and equality.
Heywood himself entered this violent controversy on the side of the femininists,
his pamphlet Uncivil Liberty containing a number of explanations
of the "woman movement." He also endorsed woman suffrage,49 at
a time when fellow opponents of government were already declaring the futility
of voting.
Warren, in retirement but an occasional contributor to both The Word and
WoodhuII and Claflin's Weekly, was a resident at Heywood's home for
a time, even though he disagreed with him on most every other issue besides
the basis of land ownership. These included the attack on possessors of
large fortunes, the graduated tax proposal, and the abuse of the eight hour
day agitation and the Massachusetts Labor Union.50 Embarrassed by the policies
which Heywood and Mrs. Woodhull, as well as the N. E. L. R. L., proclaimed,
the aging progenitor of anarchism in America gave vent to expressions of
unmistakable dissatisfaction before breaking formal relations with all and
retiring to Charlestown, Mass., to the home of Edward Linton.51
Although a severe critic, Warren was not an exponent of the conspiracy theory
of society, which Heywood now was inclined to support. He upbraided Heywood
for what he styled "hasty and injudicious" language and impatience
with those who did not understand the principles of equity and put them
into complete practice at once. The language used in The Word was
apt to repel many potential friends, he cautioned, although he hoped that
new readers would understand the use of the terms as employed by the editor.52
In like manner he opposed the uncompromising war upon state marriages; not
only were there many persons who preferred being married thus, but there
existed the potential misinterpretation by the popular press, a matter which
was of great concern to Warren by this time.53 Referring to the land question,
Warren doubted the need for the assault upon legal land titles. He continued
to
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 119 |
stand by the earlier position that land speculation would cease if all land
were sold at the price paid by the original buyer in all subsequent transactions
involving the same piece of land.54 Warren, however, proposed no tactics
which might be utilized in effecting such a reform, whereas Heywood suggested
a combination of "squatter sovereignty" and passive resistance,
the latter of these two being used with great effectiveness by the Irish
Land League against absentee English landlords at a later time.
Warren feared wealth, and felt that an effort to secure a graduated income
tax would be defeated through the efforts of capital, as well as possibly
resulting in a considerable degree of violence. Even if it were placed in
operation, he doubted that the officials in charge of raising and utilizing
the funds designated would escape immersion in wholesale graft.55 At the
same time, he warned against stressing class distinctions in reference to
possessors of wealth, or "the successful in the general scramble,"
as he chose to designate the rich. He felt that ignorance was more responsible
for misery than was purposeful design on the part of a scheming minority;
he saw all becoming oppressors in turn. In the absence of a system of "equitable
compensation," a man might be living on the "profits" made
from his particular business, and at the same time be receiving as little
as a tenth of what actually belonged to him in equity. Hence to denounce
all profit-takers as "thieves and robbers," as was occasionally
the case at the Labor Reform League meetings, was erroneous and unfair.56
Censure by both Warren and Greene57 had little effect upon the course of
Heywood's conduct of The Word or his participation in the Reform
Leagues. His admiration for their writings was equaled only by his indifference
to their criticisms as he continued an energetic campaign of writing and
speaking on an independent basis. Having expressed himself in a number of
ways which even his preceptors considered extreme, he was to continue expounding
the economic and social principles he had obtained from them, enlarging
the scope of his attentions month by month to include or reject such fragments
of the radical movement as he chose with which to align himself. In July,
1874 he formally broke with Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly as a result
of attacks on The Word and the N. E. L. R. L. stand on interest,
banking, individual sovereignty and majority rule.58 In succeeding years
he severely criticized Orvis, Brisbane, and the whole structure of Fourierite59
| 120 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
socialism. He singled out for particular disparagement the National Labor
Union, Edward Kellogg, and the Greenback movement,60 which he conceived
as serving at best to clear the way for a system of free banking. He was
convinced now that the major task of "labor reform" was the abolition
of property in land61 and not the creation of a free money structure, thus
taking sides in a controversy over which radicals haggled for the next three
decades.
Heywood was characteristically impatient with and abusive of the restraint
of liberal reform. His treatment of Washington Gladden's Working People
and Their Employers is an excellent illustration. Although believing
that it might be read with profit, he thought press reviews had been far
more complimentary than the book deserved and that Gladden had presented
no adequate solution of the difficulty at hand. He was incensed because
he believed Gladden had misrepresented the radicals and had intimated that
no portion of the radical reform group felt friendly to a peaceful settlement
of the labor question. In addition, he considered Gladden's favorable quotation
of Herbert Spencer, who misunderstood the stand of Proudhon with respect
to present holders of wealth, indicated to the average reader that the anarchists
advocated forcible dispossession, a matter concerning which the anarchists
felt particularly sensitive.62
The outbreak of the railroad strikes in the summer of 1877 brought an immediate
response from Heywood. He followed a series of editorials with a booklet,
The Great Strike, which furnished an opportunity for a summary of
anarchist economics as interpreted by the Labor Reform group, as well as
for a statement from the anti-government wing on the separate items of striking,
violence, and the attitude toward the state and capital in times of industrial
disputes. Heywood was convinced that the execution of the "Molly Maguires,"
just a month before the first of the strikes occurred, was of utmost significance.
He insisted that their arrest, trial and conviction had been based on evidence
which no court in the land would have taken against any man of wealth or
social prominence. He believed that the whole case had been "worked
up" against the Mollies by the Pinkerton Detective Agency at the express
order of the railroad interests with a deliberate intention of removing
them permanently;63 ". . . These eleven manual laborers . . . were
put out of life
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 121 |
with a ferocity which shocked the civilized world." The ensuing strike
was partially in the nature of a reaction to this initial act of violence.
This oversimplification of the cause of a complex, nation-wide affair served
to highlight Heywood's hate of the railroad companies and their collaboration
with the government.64
Heywood recognized the Pittsburgh strikers as "morally lawful belligerents"
engaging in "defensive warfare," even though he disagreed with
them diametrically in philosophy:65
The different sections of the Labor Reform movement with which I have the honor to serve do not think the destruction of life or property a judicious method of advancing any reform. We reject the philosophy of strikes, oppose trades-union monopolies of labor, and discard every other style of associative or legislative intrusion to settle this question. Personally a non-resistant, 1 would not take another's life to save my own. Asking no favors for labor but that it be left alone, I seek to abolish capital--. . . by unrestricted enterprise, by peaceful methods of evolution . . .
He deplored the use of coercion by the government
and the employers to put down the strike as "ill-advised and abortive."66
Such a course of conduct in the future with the intention of obtaining obedience
or agreement he believed would be a total failure and would result in less
harmony than had existed before. This eruption was but the beginning of
a long contest, which no amount of violence would abate. The only conditions
which would produce tranquility once more would be the total abolition of
property in land and raw materials, and the removal of all restrictions
on exchange, the "free land and free money" program.67
On November 3, 1877, Heywood was arrested while speaking in Boston by Anthony
Comstock, and charged with the violation of postal statutes relative to
the circulation of obscene material through the mails. This was the first
of three prosecutions of Heywood by the federal government on such charges,
on two of which he was convicted and served terms in prison. The subtle
degrees by which The Word had been transformed from a labor reform
to a "love reform" paper cannot be detailed,
| 122 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
even though there had been a growing body of members of Heywood's subscribers
to whom the matter of female independence before the law was of paramount
importance. Once he took up the fight for the extension of women's rights
with the primary intention of removing women from economic subjection, he
found himself drawn more and more into the display of material of somewhat
intimate nature which clashed violently with the morality attitudes reflected
in the Comstock laws. The unusual approach of several of his women correspondents,
including his own wife, the former Angela Tilton, a radical in her own right,
soon brought the paper unusual notoriety. His arrest was merely a matter
of time, in the minds even of his friends.
Heywood was sentenced to two years at hard labor on June 25, l 878,68 an
event which stirred up many elements of liberal and radical thought throughout
the East. A mass meeting of 6000 people, timed to coincide with the anniversary
of the emancipation of the West Indies slaves, culminated with a demonstration
in Faneuil Hall in Boston on August 1, demanding Heywood's release and the
repeal of the Comstock laws. Presided over by the old abolitionist, Elizur
Wright, the speakers included J. H. W. Toohey, president of the National
Defense Society, the principal opponent of the Comstock-dominated Society
for the Suppression of Vice. Other prominent participants were Laura Kendrick,
J. M. L. Babcock, Moses Hull and Thaddeus B. Wakeman, the latter the author
of a petition for the repeal of the Comstock laws which obtained 70,000
signatures.69 Heywood was released from prison the following December 19,
and pardoned by President Hayes the next day, political influence supplementing
the storm of protest emanating from free thought and liberal circles.70
Arrested a second time in the fall of l 882, Heywood was acquitted in Boston
before a federal court on April 12, 1883, in a trial where Heywood appeared
in his own defense, delivering a speech which lasted four and a half hours.
Finally declared not guilty by the jury, the verdict was received with obvious
pleasure by a considerable gathering of sympathetic onlookers.71
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 123 |
Conviction for such publishing activities as these confirmed Heywood in
his decision to continue printing the literature of the free love element,
and in 1879 he changed the policy of The Word to conform with his
advanced views of the marital and sexual question. Anti-statist views also
continued to find extended expression,72 but, like Stephen Pearl Andrews,
he became engrossed with the possibilities of a union of all the various
fragments of\ the intellectual radical movement. With the aid of Andrews,
he attempted to bring these together in a Union Reform League, with headquarters
in Princeton, but at the end of three years, the major part of the interest
in such a project had waned. The '80's saw the initiative in the spreading
of anarchism pass into the hands of Benjamin Tucker and his associates,
who for a time confined their attentions to predominantly economic questions.
For a brief period, in 1889, Heywood re-entered the arena, stimulated by
the widespread campaign for local option on the part of temperance groups
in Massachusetts, following the passage of a local option law in Ohio in
1888.73 The drive for the prohibition of the sale and traffic of liquor
by law, accompanied by a parallel proposition to control the sale of alcoholic
beverages by state license, provoked the appearance of the vigorous counter-attack
Social Ethics, wherein Heywood arraigned the crusade to legislate
the virtue of temperance.
He protested that whether an individual partook of alcohol or abstained
was strictly an affair of his own. Philosophically, morally, or politically,
the drive to promote sobriety was baseless, in the eyes of the believer
in natural society, where personal freedom was unrestrained except when
it approached the area where it infringed on the similarity of freedom possessed
by another.74 Blanket statutory prohibition constituted a serious invasion
of individual personality; and, said Heywood, "individuals are the
primary and ultimate facts in this wilderness of pronoun which is called
society."75 Total prohibition or state-licensed sale were sides of
the same coin; one despaired of liberty and the other of temperance, "two
distrusts of the ability of men and women to work out their own salvation."76
Prohibition he considered irrational sumptuary legislation which contributed
nothing to bridging the moral gap, while licensing in the hope
| 124 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
of producing temperance by destroying the "grog shop" approached the problem from the reverse side of truth, since the habit of intemperance preceded the dispensary, and not vice versa.77 The drive to license the sale in salutary surroundings was "a raid on the poor man's hotel," the saloon, and highly suspicious:78
. . . the hypocritical manifesto of the politico-ecclesiastical rogues trying to sail between rum and water into office. If it is right to sell rum at all, it is the right of poor men and women to sell it. License is wrong because . . . civil power ought not to sanction evil manifest in ill-use of liquor; . . . because it accepts intemperance as a fixed permanent fact, instead of working to abolish it; . . . because it enacts monopoly . . . and enshrines vicious practices in attractive, respectable, insidious environment.
When Heywood was convicted for postal law violations
in 1878, he had suspected that others than his publishing business had precipitated
his difficulties, especially his attitudes toward labor and government.
When he was again arrested on similar charges, in May, 1890,79 he was convinced
that it was a political matter. The new Harrison administration had replaced
the Democratic postmaster in Princeton with an enemy of Heywood's, Josiah
D. Gregory, whom the former referred to as a "high-toned, prohibitory,
anti-saloon Republican,"80 a man unsympathetic with any radical sentiment.
At his direction, deliveries of The Word had been interrupted.
Heywood was sentenced again to two years in prison in Charlestown, serving
the full term. Several petitions to Harrison for pardon were ignored, largely
because of malice on the part of his own relatives, Heywood charged.81 One
of these petitions, signed by 1400 prominent persons in the United States,
England and Scotland, including Elizabeth B. Chase, Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Annie Besant, Andrew Jackson Davis, Theoder Dwight Weld, the pioneer abolitionist,
and several other well-known persons, indicated the interest the case aroused.82
Efforts to have
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 125 |
his paper printed in his absence failed, and for the first time in 18 years,
the first sustained voice of anarchist doctrine in America was silenced.
Resumed in 1892 upon its editor's return, it permanently lapsed when he
died May 22, 1893, little over a year after returning.
Ezra Heywood is best remembered for his efforts in the propagation of native
anti-government thought and literature83 during a period of transition when
radicalism was receding almost to the vanishing point before a wave of post-war
sentiment for continued conformity. Although not particularly important
as an original thinker, his services as a publisher in reprinting the works
of Warren and Greene served to keep their ideas current, resulting in the
widespread interest in the economics of the free society on the part of
a later generation. His own erratic writings were not without influence;
some of his floridity, acrid phrasing and talent for articulation was to
be found in the work of Tucker at a later time. The revival of the mutual
money theories of Greene is particularly noteworthy from the standpoint
of anarchist economic thought, in this respect Heywood's work being an important
rediscovery.
2. William B. Greene, Money Reformer
The fundamental structure of American anarchism
is without doubt based upon the social and economic experiments and writings
of Josiah Warren. In one respect however, his subsequent followers chose
to expand the limits of the outline of the free economy. This was in a field
in which the New Harmony pioneer had been noticeably inconclusive, finance.
The gradual but increasing complexity of the economy, especially the division
of labor occurring in both production and distribution, brought the matter
of exchange more forcibly to the attention of the anti-statist radicals.
This resulted in one of the few real additions to Warrenite mutualism, the
idea of the mutual bank of William B. Greene, an ignored contemporary of
Warren's during the period of the experimental towns.
Greene, unlike Warren, did not devote a lifetime to unorthodox activities.
His life touched the radical movement with intensity only at intervals,
and his conversion to full-fledged anarchist beliefs occupied only the last
ten years of his life, despite an intimate acquaintanceship of a full three
decades. Furthermore, his early years give no clue as to the source of any
of his later interest in political economy and finance. In a similar manner
to Ezra Heywood, it was a sequel to an abortive career in the ministry.
Born in Haverhill, Massachusetts,84 the son of a Boston newspaper
| 126 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
publisher, Greene was educated at West Point, and acquired there an affinity
with military ways that he never repudiated, despite his early defection.
He took part in the Seminole campaign in Florida against Osceola as a young
officer, and while on active duty professed to have gone through a sudden
conversion to religion, now believing war to be "unjust." He continued
to hold his commission and remain in the fighting area, however, hesitant
to expose himself to expected ridicule on announcing his change of heart.85
He returned north following a serious illness after eighteen months of service
and entered a theological seminary. Becoming an Unitarian, he now devoted
much of his time to the study of Egyptian and Indian history and religion,
some of his later writings indicating a competent grasp of oriental philosophy.86
After leaving the Harvard Divinity School, where he had become an associate
of Thomas Wentworth Higginson,87 he located in Brookfield, near Worcester,
and engaged in the writing of religious tracts and pamphlets.
Few instances in American history have created as much curiosity concerning
economic and financial matters among amateurs and members of the general
citizenry as the panic of 1837, and the drastic credit stringency which
characterized it. Banking abuses came under concentrated scrutiny and gave
rise to many proposed radical remedies. William Beck's plan for inducing
the business world to adopt credit and employ it so as to perform the functions
of money by utilizing a complicated system which generalized credit in account,
was broached in 1839, and was one of the first. Edward Kellogg's Labor
and Other Capital, a direct outgrowth of his personal experiences in
the panic, had been completed by July, 1843, although it remained unpublished
for several years and did not receive much attention until post-Civil War
times.88 Other plans, involving considerable originality and inspired by
a fear of the potentialities of a money system based on an alliance between
large bankers and politicians, sought to impress the independent-minded
with the possibilities of solution on a local level, by-passing reforms
requiring large-scale adoption.
Financial thinking was still dominated by concepts which dated from
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 127 |
early eighteenth century times, and concerned the needs of a decentralized
economic society. A product of the colonial land bank period, the philosophy
centered on a banking system based on private credit. This situation may
have been aided by the comparative lack of a commercial class in the vast
non-urban areas, the group most interested in central banking policies along
European models.89
The drive for centralized banking on mercantile credit, well under way by
the 1837 panic, was meeting plenty of opposition during the same period,
since it hardly coincided with majority opinion well down to the Civil War.
Many expert critics, among them Richard Hildreth, William M. Gouge and George
Tucker, had promoted the idea of competition in banking, attacked the national
bank and condemned state chartered banks in general.90
Free banking in the sense in which it was understood during this period
was not synonymous with the unchartered system proposed by early individualist
anarchists. Despite many structural similarities and often a similar propaganda
the two financial theories proceeded along separate ways. It can readily
be seen, however, that the monetary theories of Greene and Lysander Spooner
are deeply indebted to the environment of unrest caused by disturbed relations
existing in the money system of the United States of their times.
The writings of Greene were to become the best known, although Spooner had
previously stated the position of the free money decentralist in Greene's
home area with the publication of his Constitutional Law Relative to
Credit, Currency and Banking in Worcester in 1843. Spooner had followed
this up with an even more positive work in this line, Poverty, Its Illegal
Causes and Legal Cure, which appeared in Boston three years later.91
It is doubtful whether Greene had any knowledge of these brief treatises
when his own expositions of the philosophy of mutualism in banking began
to appear for the first time, in a series of newspaper articles in the Worcester
Palladium in 1849 under the pseudonym "Omega." Gathered
together and expanded with unpublished material, the collection was issued,
under the title Equality, in West Brookfield
| 128 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
that same year. This is essentially the same work brought out under the
title Mutual Banking the following year, and was destined to become
the most widely reprinted of all anarchist financial publications written
by a native American. For an understanding of Greene's political, economic
and social ideas they are best studied together.
A bank, in Greene's opinion, had only one reason for existing: that of being
a place to bring together borrowers and lenders, regardless of what the
particular capital available for lending consisted and what was wanted by
the borrower. The man without tools and raw material was helpless despite
any degree of industry, while the owner of such things faced the prospect
of watching them deteriorate in the event that laborers desiring them for
productive purposes could not be found. Being what he called "mutually
necessary" to each other, their efforts to locate each other was a
continual process, which banks could greatly facilitate.92 The bank as he
saw it, however, was an anti-social institution, carrying on a war with
those citizens who did not happen to be a part of it. Free competition among
owners of capital he regarded a healthful thing, depressing the rate of
interest and guaranteeing to the worker a greater percentage return of the
total of his production. Once a bank in the ordinary sense of the word became
organized, this process abruptly ceased. The device thus conceived enabled
a number of lenders to escape the consequences of competition, and enabled
them to bring "crushing" force upon individuals who did not belong
to their number, thus resulting in their possessing the power to control
interest rates to their best advantage and prevent the fall of the price
of any commodity which they offered to potential lenders.93 Chartered by
the legislature, they were now in a perfect position "to enable the
few to bring the many under tribute"; "On the side of the bank
there is a small army, well equipped, well officered, and well disciplined;
on the side of the community, there is a large, undisciplined crowd, without
arms, and without leaders."94
The picture was complete only as far as the particular group of capitalists
forming the bank in question was considered; there still existed the possibility
of competition from without, with the consequent much-feared drop in the
rate of interest. Here the hand of government, which granted them the monopoly
of incorporation, stepped in again to preclude the latter possibility with
another special privilege.95 But to understand this stage, Greene declared,
it was necessary to review the
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 129 |
position of the government in the general matters of the currency and artificially-created
rates of interest.
Greene believed that all trade was barter in one form or another. The adoption
of specie by society as a circulating medium merely made the process easier
rather than destroyed it. It still remained a valuable commodity, subject
to purchase and sale like all others; ". . . when we sell anything
for money, we buy the money, and . . . when we buy anything with
money, we sell the money."96
With the establishment of specie in the form of gold and silver as the only
legal tender by the government and the exclusion of all other types of property
from furnishing this function, an altogether new element entered into consideration.
Exchange remained the same type of process, but the action of the legislature
had enhanced the utility of the precious metals in a "remarkable manner."
The exchangeable value of a particular commodity depended upon not only
its utility but the relative scarcity of it as well. The relative scarcity
of gold and silver gave them now a new value not inherent in them as metals,
but an artificial one conferred on them by the action of the government,
presumably in the interests of society.97 The result? Greene said that now
the metals became a marketable commodity as a medium of exchange,
and their utility as a means of exchange became abruptly contracted, allowing
those who managed to obtain a monopoly of the supply of these metals to
similarly control the business of the area using them as the sole legal
tender, and thereby secure a premium for their use by all others engaging
in commerce.98 "Hence follow great social and political evils,"
commented Greene. One of the major attempts to repair the damage done to
the commercial structure was the passage by the government of laws arbitrarily
limiting the rate of interest. This did nothing to restore any kind of competition
among loaners of capital, however, because of still another government-created
factor, the allowing of holders of specie, incorporated as banks, to issue
paper money up to twice the face value of the specie.99 This enable them
to gather twice the rate of interest permitted, or to drive all non-banker
loaners of capital out by charging one-half the interest until
| 130 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
the latter ceased competing. Thus even "usury" laws100 were negated by the creation of banks. The process now went along relatively unhindered, Greene observed:101
Now the banks have everything in their hands. They make great issues, and money becomes plenty; . . . all other commodities become dear. Then the capitalist sells what he has to sell, while prices are high. The banks draw in their issues, and money becomes scarce, . . . all other commodities become cheap. The community becomes distressed for money, individuals are forced to sell property to raise money--and to sell at a loss on account of the state of the market: then the capitalist buys what he desires to buy, while everything is cheap.... The operation of the banking system is evident; . . .
He commented briefly on the impact that banking
and credit organization was producing upon production and price levels.
The corollary to credit monopoly, he noted, was an accompanying belief that
price was determined by the amount of labor that different commodities could
command, which he designated "the philosophy of speculation on human
misfortune." "Considered from this point of view," Greene
pointed out, "the price of commodities is regulated, not by the labor
expended in their production, but by the distress and want of the laboring
class." A vigorous proponent of the labor cost theory of value, as
was Warren, he pronounced: 'There is no device of the political economists
so infernal as the one which ranks labor as a commodity, varying in value
according to supply and demand."102 Greene stoutly held that the ratio
of the supply of labor to the demand for it was unvarying because every
producer was a consumer "to the precise extent of the amount of his
products," and the price of labor ought therefore to be constant.
Greene admitted that there was not only a market price for commodities,
which he believed to be based on supply and demand, but a "natural"
price, as well, which depended on its cost of production. Although these
were in a state of continual oscillation due to the credit system, under
a proper system they would coincide at all times.103 The phenomena of want
and "overproduction" were directly attributable to the credit
structure. "Many a tailor has carried his coat to a market where coats
were at once voted over production, not because there was no real
demand for coats, but because there was no money demand for them.”104
Credit as he saw it in operation was actually perpetuating feudalism. Money
was furnished to individuals and corporations prin-
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 131 |
cipally for purposes of speculation, advantageous to the speculators if
successful, catastrophic to the community if a failure. Monopoly of trade
or insecurity were the alternatives of "the existing organization of
credit . . . the daughter of hard money, begotten upon it incestuously by
that insufficiency of circulating medium which results from laws making
specie the sole legal tender.”105
Greene's proposition for remedying the cyclical money shortage and the artificial
control of the economy vested in the banking fraternity by the government
was the "mutual bank." Any person could become a member of this
bank by pledging mortgages to the bank on actual property, upon which he
would be issued bills of exchange amounting to one-half of the total value
of the mortgaged property.106 No money was to be loaned to persons not members
of the particular banking company, all members entering into a voluntary
agreement to accept the paper of the bank in all payments, at par, when
presented by fellow members. The rate of interest at which the money was
to be loaned to the members was to be sufficient only to pay the operating
expenses of the institution. Greene claimed that one per cent would be enough.
Other principles of the mutual bank provided for the release of the member
from his pledge when his mortgage had been redeemed, and a declaration promising
perpetual non-redemption in specie of the bills of the bank.
What the Greene proposal amounted to was a mutual agreement on the part
of a number of persons to monetize other values than specie to the amount
of one-half of the declared valuation of a given volume of these other values,
preferably real property. However, he once said, ". . . anything that
may be sold under the hammer may be made a basis for the issue of mutual
money.”107 At the time he originally proposed such a bank, he suggested
that the undertaking be postponed until 10,000 persons signified their intentions
of starting the organization. This he thought would insure the feeling of
security on the part of the members, because all might inspect the books
and thus observe on what basis all others were having money issued. This
would be further strengthened by the psychological effect of ]0,000 persons
in the vicinity of such a bank, all using the bills in the member stores,
hotels, theatres, tailor shops, restaurants and similar business enterprises,
in payment for desired goods and services.108
Currency in sufficient volume to satisfy the need thereof was Greene's objective,
which necessitated a complete divorce from the specie idea of
| 132 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
redemption. However, he found no fault with having the valuation of the monetized property expressed with the silver dollar as the standard of value in mind, and the measure of value as well. Thus tied to the silver dollar, the mutual bank bills would rise and fall with the value of silver dollars, without fear of depreciation. Based on the dollar as the measure of value, the silver at a designated degree of fineness and weight as the standard of value, the mutual money was to serve only as an instrument of exchange.109 Greene considered that such money would escape the evil consequences attending scarcity or excess of supply. It would always be worth its face value in silver dollars. Like Proudhon, he believed that the element of money which rendered it insecure was the doubt of final redemption in specie, and he proposed to eliminate this by generalizing the bill of exchange:110
. . . that is to say, in making of it an anonymous title, exchangeable forever, and redeemable at sight, but only in merchandise and services. Or, to speak a language more comprehensible to financial adepts, the problem consists in basing bank paper . . . upon products.
The mutual bank was a "producer's bank,"
said Greene. Its currency was non-interest-bearing. The monetization of
commodities other than gold and silver would tend to further depress the
rate of interest. This would enable a person with only his labor to offer
to easily borrow capital to engage in productive work and thus create capital
goods of his own. Individuals would thus join a mutual bank company not
in expectation of a dividend but to facilitate the procurement of money,
a lowering rate of interest being substituted for the usual dividend incentive.111
Greene objected to the comparison of the mutual money with the disreputable
"wildcat money" of a decade before on four grounds. The wildcat
issues not only promised to redeem in specie, but professed to be based
on specie which did not exist. By pretending to be gold and silver, they
gravely "deranged" the currency. Without specie backing or any
other guarantee, the money was principally borrowed by the stockholders
of these wildcat banks. Mutual money, on the other hand, was not redeemable
in specie, but in actual existing commodities of other types. Furthermore,
issued against actual values, it was utilized by all who "insured"
it, and had no more effect upon the precious metals than upon any other
particular materials or commodities.112
What would be the consequences of decentralized mutual banking
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 133 |
upon such a basis as Greene proposed? A frontal attack on the state was his conclusion:113
Mutualism operates, by its very nature, to render political government, founded on arbitrary force, superfluous; that is, it operates to the decentralization of the political power, and to the transformation of the State by substituting self-government instead of government ab extra..
An investigation of American colonial history not
only reinforced this conclusion but resulted in his abandonment of any claims
to originality as far as the mutual bank idea was concerned. In actuality,
Greene's and Kellogg's financial propositions had venerable antecedents
in the history of eighteenth century Massachusetts, where "land banks"114
remarkably similar to that of Greene had been proposed in 1714 and again
in 1740. The earlier bank had never obtained the sanction of the General
Court, and died in discussion, while that of 1740 actually operated for
a time, with admitted success.115 This latter bank, which received widespread
popular support, nevertheless terminated abruptly. It was disallowed by
the British Parliament, acting at the request of the governor and others
whom Thomas Hutchinson designated as "men of estates and the principal
merchants in the province."116 Hutchinson, no friend of the venture,
labeled its originators "persons in difficult or involved circumstances
in trade, or such as were possessed of real estates but had little or no
ready money at command," and supported primarily by those "generally
of low condition among the plebeians and of small estate."117
Greene considered it highly significant that Hutchinson admitted the strength
of the bank, confessing that "Had not parliament interposed, the province
would have been in the utmost confusion, and the authority
| 134 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
of government entirely in the land bank company."118 It was Greene's interpretation that the principal disturbance created by the bank had been political rather than economic:119
. . . Gov. Hutchinson ought to have explained more in detail the nature of the evils he complains of; and also to have told us why he, a declared enemy of popular institutions, opposed the advocates of the bank so uncompromisingly.
The discovery of a colonial precedent neither detracted
from Greene's enthusiasm for his project nor cast any suspicions upon his
independent status as an innovator. With the financial writings of others,
however, he was already familiar, particularly Kellogg and Proudhon. It
is highly probable that he learned from both,120 even though later editions
of his works carried sharp criticisms of some of their theories.121 Favorable
quotations of Kellogg in several of his works indicated a thorough reading
at one time of Labor and Other Capital.122 His knowledge of Proudhon
appears to have been somewhat less thorough until after a stay in France
in the late '50's, during which time he became personally acquainted with
the internationally-known French anarchist.123 It is most inaccurate to
speak of Greene simply as a proponent of Proudhonian principles.
Coming at a time when the labor and consumer groups were experi-
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 135 |
menting with "associated workshops" and "protective union
stores," Greene suggested that the mutual bank be incorporated in the
movement, forming what he called "complementary units of production,
consumption, and exchange, . . . the triple formula of practical mutualism."
This program of mutualism he considered best adapted to local community
level. In times of economic distress, the mutual money would prove the bulwark
against inflationary or deflationary pressures: "the town cannot fail
disastrously, for the real property is always there, rooted in the very
ground."124
For some time the campaign ran strongly to obtain a charter from the Massachusetts
General Court for the establishment of a mutual bank. Greene, now in Boston,
argued the case before the Town and Country Club of which he was a member,
along with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Henry
James, the elder, W. H. Channing, Octavius B. Frothingham, William D. Ticknor,
Charles Sumner, E. R. Hoar, Henry Giles, John Orvis, and George B. Loring.
Repeated petitions to the General Court were made in 1850-51 both under
his sponsorship and that of groups of inhabitants of Brookfield, Ware and
Warren.125 In l 857 he restated his financial arguments in a volume titled
The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, and the Advantages
of a Mutual Currency, under the stimulation of the new panic assailing
the nation's economy. Apathy was the principal response. Shortly thereafter
Greene left for France, where he became interested for a time in mathematics,126
concern over social matters abating until after the war.
Greene's Equality contained other than his money and banking theories.
Some of his sociological ideas, albeit evidencing little logical organization
and often contradictory, appeared here and there in its pages. One was his
assertion that as an individual, a man received certain rights at creation,
but that the right of property was not one of them. This was a social creation,
and was not absolute. "Society gives me . . . proprietorship . . .
because it is for its own interests to do so; my right to my watch is not
a natural, but a social right. I own it, not because I earned it, . . .
but by the free grace and favor of society."127 Greene's conception
of individualism, however, was religious in nature. Although failing to
describe the rights which the individual received from God, he condemned
coercion of any kind as a contention against God Himself. It was therefore
"profoundly immoral" to make a man dependent upon
| 136 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
his neighbors or upon public opinion, which made him "subservient to
his accidents, instead of supreme over them."128
In another respect he was much less indefinite. Equality contained
one of the first of the anarchist arraignments of socialism as a system
of societal organization. Socialism, averred Greene, was the only political
system in which he could see no "good points." In other types
he saw a few privileged groups such as nobles, slaveholders, or "usurers"
who managed to gather some advantages as compared to the volume of evil
endured by "the mass of the people," but no one appeared to gain
under socialism.129
In socialism, there is but one master, which is the state; but the state is not a living person, capable of suffering and happiness. Socialism benefits none but demagogues, and is, emphatically, the organization of universal misery . . . socialism gives us but one class, a class of slaves.
Written at a time when proponents of "state"
socialism had hardly begun to state the theory, Greene's blast presaged
the ideological conflict which was to break out in full flower in the anarchist
and socialist journals of thirty-five years later.
Greene's career after his advocacy of the mutual bank was as much an account
of irreconcilables as that which had previously transpired. Although abhorring
government beyond the local level, he joined the Democratic party. At the
Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1853 he championed minority representation
and woman suffrage. He was also an outspoken abolitionist.”130 Wealthy by
inheritance and marriage, he returned from his stay in France at the outbreak
of the Civil War, and became commander of the 14th Massachusetts Regiment,
later resigning after a quarrel with Governor Andrew.131
Activity in the ranks of the intellectual radicals once more absorbed his
interest at the end of the war. He restated most of his social philosophy
in a small book titled Sovereignty of the People, at about the time
| Transition to Philosophical Egoism I | 137 |
Heywood's Worcester group began to demonstrate interest in the mutual bank
literature. The reprinting of an enlarged edition of Mutual Banking,
the formation of the Labor Reform Leagues, and Heywood's publication of
The Word all found in Greene a ready supporter and participant. In
the latter part of 1872 he became a member of the French Section of the
Marxian International Working People's Association in Boston. Shortly afterward
he became president of the New England Labor Reform League.132 This affiliation
placed the N. E. L. R. L. as a whole under suspicion as a branch of the
International. The aims of the former were alleged to be a mere restatement
of those of "the foreign communists."133 Although he collaborated
with French members in the formulation of an address outlining the principles
of the International Working People's Association, which was subsequently
read before the N. E. L. R. L. at the 1873 convention,134 it appears that
neither he nor the League continued relations. This is borne out by Greene's
critical writings concerning communism and his first translations of Proudhon's
writings.135
Between 1872-1876 Heywood and the League made several attempts to obtain
a charter for a mutual bank from the Massachusetts General Court, but to
no avail. The earliest of these was buried in the Committee on Banks and
Banking, three of whose seven members were bankers themselves. The general
treatment received strengthened the convictions of prominent members of
the League that "legislatures are made up of capitalists who draw pay
for serving their own interests, not the people's." Greene participated
in general criticism of the legislature but gave no evidence of entertaining
hope that opposition might be overcome.136
| 138 | MEN AGAINST THE STATE |
Greene returned to Europe in the spring of 1878. His premature death in
Weston, England137 during this same year brought to an end the career of
the ablest native American anarchist writer and theorist on finance. Mutual
Banking remained prominent in the individualist propaganda thereafter
without additions or abridgement. It was widely read by those interested
in radical currency, and has been reprinted repeatedly up to the present
day.138
The contributions of Ezra Heywood and William B. Greene to native anarchist
thought are important not only in themselves but also in their impact upon
contemporaries and later converts. Ineffectual upon the radical movement
as a whole due to their unconcern with class consciousness, they were regarded
as mere examples of the petty bourgeois response to the grave and growing
economic disarrangements of their time. Their importance in the transition
period between the experimental colonies and the strictly intellectual propaganda
of anti-statism cannot be ignored, for by 1890 their efforts had become
recognized among radicals everywhere as a contribution to revolutionary
social philosophy. Greene's currency ideas gradually became those which
the latter-day anarchists supported, even though they represented a change
from those originally developed by Warren. The "labor for labor"
ideas embodied in the labor check system, found in the writings of both
Warren and Andrews, dropped from the discussions of the problems of exchange.
Mutual banking and currency based on a commodity standard of value, but
allowing for the monetization of all durable wealth, now became the core
of anti-statist finance. In like manner Warren's approach to the land problem
was modified by the inclusion of more studied and abstract thinking by less
radical exponents of reform.
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