CHAPTER ONE

BENJAMIN R. TUCKER: ANARCHISM, TYRANNY, AND DESPAIR

In his unpublished autobiography, penned in his final resting place of Monaco, Benjamin R. Tucker (2008) concluded, “My life, though far from unhappy, is packed with incident, and has been one long flouting of the moral law.” It is certainly a unique story. He was born in a snowstorm in 1854 in South Dartmouth, in southern Massachusetts, and educated at the nearby Friends’ Academy, an institution to which he (2008) refers as “the crack school of New Bedford,” and later at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), having resisted his parents’ desire for him to attend Harvard, where many Friends’ Academy graduates continued their stud- ies. He spent three years at MIT, enjoying its promise of access to scientific knowledge as well as the metropolitan location in Boston, but did not graduate (McElroy 2003, 2; Reichert 1976, 141–142; Tucker 2008). His uncle, Charles Almy, an abolitionist, was the presiding officer of the New Bedford Lyceum, and so, in his youth, Tucker attended speeches that were given at that auditorium by a number of radical thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and anti-slavery leaders who included Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips. Tucker’s interest in anarchism escalated after an unplanned meeting with Josiah Warren at the 1872 Boston convention of the New England Labor Reform League (Madison 1943, 444, 452; McElroy 2003, 2; Tucker 2008). Ghio (1903, 47) notes that this encounter with American Anarchism’s first prominent thinker led immediately to “une affection profonde et filiale” [a deep filial fondness] on the part of Tucker. At the same gathering, he also managed to meet Colonel William B. Greene, who was the organization’s president, Ezra Heywood, and Lysander Spooner; all three were prominent individu- alist anarchists who had been abolitionists (Frisken 2004, 107; Reichert 1976, 144). These early acquaintances lasted for a long time, and some- times until death. Martin (1970, 203) notes that Tucker became “friendly with Warren, Spooner, and Greene despite considerable disparity in age,” and that Warren used to visit Tucker at his home (203, fn 5). In an initial act of rebellion against the state of Massachusetts’ poll tax, Tucker was imprisoned briefly in the Worcester County jail. Such revolt was an act of “Civil Disobedience” that had previously been conducted

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and then celebrated by Thoreau in his 1849 essay bearing that name. Somewhat dismissively, Martin (1970, 205) refers to Tucker’s protest as “his quixotic repetition of the celebrated refusal of Henry David Thoreau to pay taxes.” To Tucker’s dismay, an unidentified person paid the obliga- tion, an act that also mirrors the resolution of Thoreau’s brief imprison- ment, and he was released (Horowitz 1964, 169; Martin 1970, 205, fn 17; McElroy 2005; Pennell 2006, 136; Reichert 1976, 144). Tucker’s opening foray into his career as editor of a political publication occurred with Radical Review, the first issue of which appeared in 1877. However, when Heywood, the publisher of the Word, was arrested at a meeting of the New England Free Love League and imprisoned (for dis- pensing advice about contraception in a pamphlet called Cupid’s Yokes, a violation of the Comstock Act), Tucker, who would later refer to a subse- quent arrest of Heywood on the same pretext as “[a]nother outrage on the freedom of the press” (Tucker 1882e, 1), took over the management of Heywood’s publication as well. This meant that he had less time to spend on Radical Review, and the paper soon died (Blatt 1982a, 34; Martin 1970, 207; McElroy 2003, 160). Blatt (34) says that Radical Review “was a short- lived venture,” which perished as “a result of Tucker’s commitment to helping his former mentor, who was in trouble.” Alternatively, Hamilton (1982, 9) argues that Tucker started the magazine with money from a bequest, and that this was why Radical Review petered out after just four quarterly issues; Reichert (1976, 145) also mentions the significance of the inheritance to the publication’s founding. Although there were only four issues of Radical Review, they included contributions from “free love” pro- moter Stephen Pearl Andrews, another anarchist-abolitionist, whom Tucker called “one of the mental giants and free spirits of this age” (Tucker 1885a, 1), and from Spooner (Hiskes 1982, 84). For eleven years, Tucker also worked as a member of the mainstream press, editing journalists’ copy for the Boston Daily Globe (Madison 1943, 446). While this provided resources to fund his other activities, there was certainly an ironic aspect to his taking on such employment, for, as the fellow anarchist, the Ukrainian-born Victor Yarros (1936, 472) points out, “to write for capitalistic or bourgeois newspapers was, in his eyes, the worst form of prostitution.” Interestingly, though, when Tucker cited an editorial from the Globe, he wrote, without any apparent insincerity, of “so prominent a newspaper as the Boston “Daily Globe”” (Tucker 1881d, 1). Tucker’s main claim to prominence derives from the publication Liberty, which he both edited and wrote articles for, first out of Boston and then from New York City. In the second issue of the paper, Tucker

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