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Home , Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews

19TH-CENTURY ANARCHISTS:

JOSIAH WARREN

One of the staunchest of Thoreau attackers, Vincent Buranelli, in “The Case Against Thoreau” (Ethics 67), would allege in 1957 that Henry from time to time altered his principles and his tactics with little or no legitimation. Buranelli charged him with having practiced a radical and dangerous politics. In his article we learn that Thoreau’s political theory “points forward to Lenin, the ‘genius theoretician’ whose right it is to force a suitable on those who do not have it, and to the horrors that resulted from Hitler’s ‘intuition’ of what was best for .” In his article we learn that Thoreau’s defense of John Brown gave “allegiance to inspiration rather than to ratiocination and factual evidence.” According to this source “Thoreau’s commitment to personal revelation made him an anarchist.” 1 An anarchist? According to the ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA, the term “” derives from a Greek root signifying “without a rule” and indicates “a cluster of doctrines whose principal uniting feature is the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary.” So who the hell are these people, the “Anarchists”? —Well, although an early theorist of the no-

1. The initials of the person who prepared this material for the EB were “G.W.” — the PROPÆDIA volume lists these initials as belonging to George Woodcock, apparently a recidivist encyclopedist as he is listed as also having prepared a number of other ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA articles. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN government society was the who had founded

the Digger movement in England as of 1649, and although the first widely distributed anarchist writings had been those of as of 1793, and although the first person willing to term

himself an anarchist had been Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as of HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN 1840, — it turns out that our Henry Thoreau has the honor of

being first on the EB’s shortlist of American suspects! In the , a native and mainly nonviolent tradition developed during the 19th century in the writings of Henry Thoreau, Josiah Warren, , and (editor of The Anarchist, a highly individualist journal published in ). Activist Anarchism in the U.S. was mainly sustained by immigrants from Europe, including (editor of Die Frieheit), , and , whose gives a picture of radical activity in the United States at the turn of the century. David S. Reynolds has offered us an interestingly different 2 shortlist in his BENEATH THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. This is to be found on page 98: In reestablishing Thoreau’s links with his age, we should remind ourselves initially of what is already known but sometimes forgotten: he can be directly connected with other reformers and writers of his time. Other Thoreau-like figures included the notable nineteenth-century individualistic anarchists —Josiah Warren, , William Batchelder Greene, , and Benjamin Tucker– who were from Thoreau’s home state of Massachusetts and were his contemporaries. What I immediately flashed on when I saw the above allegation was, “Hey, here are 5 guys, all Thoreau’s contemporaries, and all from his home state — and not one of these guys has as yet been captured to be represented in the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo contexture in spite of the fact that we have been working on this database for all of seven years [at that point] and are pushing toward having recorded 500 thumbnail biographies of such contemporaries! –So, why not, have I been overlooking something? Did these 5 guys have something in common with Thoreau over and above proximity in location and in duration?” The results of my initial Boolean searches are below: Josiah Warren — nothing in common, no connection at all. 2. Reynolds, David S. BENEATH THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE: THE SUBVERSIVE IMAGINATION IN THE AGE OF EMERSON AND MELVILLE. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1989. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN Ezra Heywood — nothing in common, no connection at all.

William Batchelder Greene — There happened to have been a Thomas A. Greene in New Bedford who had rare plants of to Thoreau. There happened to have been a Calvin Greene who asked for and paid for a photograph of Thoreau. There happened to have been an Anne Greene Phillips who went to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in the summer of 1840. Relatives maybe? No, there was no William B. Greene to be found. Stephen Pearl Andrews — nothing in common, no connection at all. Benjamin Ricketson Tucker — nothing in common, no connection at all.

I’m not sure what conclusion could be derived from such a study as this, other than perhaps that individualistic anarchists aren’t all that interested in networking with one another, or that proximity in location and duration, such as co-presence in a State or co-presence in a Century, tends to amount to hardly anything at all in the great scheme of things.

One thing I am sure of, however, is that using the standard tactic employed by our FBI, of guilt by association, if the Federal Bureau of Investigation had ever investigated Thoreau on suspicion of his being an anarchist, they would have concluded that he was “not a keeper.” My reasoning is as follows. The type case of the anarchist would be Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the property-is-theft internationalist who lived and wrote at the same time as Thoreau, and was in and out of prison in France. He would be at the exact center of every anarchist’s hotlist. If Thoreau had been intrigued at all by the various ideas of the various anarchists, for sure he –who read French very HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN adequately– would have been consulting the writings of Proudhon, whose life exactly overlapped his, as they appeared, QUEST CE-QUE LA PROPRIÉTÉ (WHAT IS PROPERTY?) in 1840 followed by WARNING TO PROPRIETORS in 1842 followed by PHILOSOPHIE DE LA MISÈRE (SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS; OR, THE PHILOSOPHY OF POVERTY) in 1846 followed by LE REPRESENTANT DU PEUPLE in 1848 followed by CONFESSIONS D’UN REVOLUTIONAIRRE in 1849 followed by THE GENERAL IDEA OF THE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY in 1851 followed by DE LA JUSTICE DANS LA REVOLUTION ET DANS L’EGLISE in 1858. However, we have records on Thoreau’s reading which are at least as good as the stacks of reports which our FBI obsessively collects of the readings and contacts of “suspect” (marginal) persons, and the interesting fact is, Thoreau never ever displayed the slightest interest either in Proudhon or in any other of this mottled collection of scribblers and agitators.

So, here’s the report I would make, if I were an operative investigating Henry Thoreau as a security risk. Taking a clue from the manner in which, in the early 1960s, the national security investigators actually behaved in regard to me personally, I would deliver the following report to my superior officer: “We weren’t able to come up with much, but maybe if we lean on him, we can turn something up. Let’s interrogate, wink wink nudge nudge, him about the fact that Waldo Emerson’s first wife Ellen Louisa Tucker was a Tucker, and in a considerably later timeframe the known anarchist Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was also a Tucker. Had Henry perhaps met Emerson’s first wife? Let’s interrogate him about the fact that Emerson’s second wife, Lidian Jackson Emerson, did receive, in 1843 in Concord, evidently by post, a gift of a volume of tales translated by the man who in 1854 would become the father of the know anarchist William Batchelder Greene. Did Thoreau perhaps borrow this book from Lidian and read these tales? What did he make of them? Was there any suspicious disloyal content? We both know that the real purpose of such “investigations” is persecution, and that they are designed to put the fear of the Lord in people and make sure they understand who is boss. Let’s do like we did with Austin Meredith and tell him that we interviewed his mother — and that his mother had told us all about how when he was a teenager, she found out that he masturbated. Who knows what guilty connections will show up?” HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN

1832

On the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, there was an outbreak of the Asian cholera.

James Fenimore Cooper, in Paris with his family when the scourge hit that metropolis, commented upon how the gardens of the Tuileries suddenly became deserted.

In America, white settlements were not enjoying good health but the Mandan and Hidatsa were being utterly destroyed. Take a look at the discussion by Richard Batman beginning on page 320 of James Pattie’s WEST: THE DREAM AND THE REALITY (in hardcover, titled AMERICAN ECCLESIASTES: THE STORIES OF JAMES PATTIE. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1986) having to do with the new and terrifying plague of cholera sweeping the settled east about the same time. Physicians would reject the contagion theory (with the exception of smallpox), until in the latter part of the 19th Century work on cholera finally would show that it and other such diseases were indeed, like smallpox, contagious.

Dr. James Ellsworth De Kay returned from Turkey to New-York, where he began to prescribe port wine as a remedy for cholera and quickly earned for himself a nickname, “Dr. Port.” Saloon customers would be able to ask the bartender to pour them “a Dr. DeKay.” Soon he settled at Oyster Bay on Long Island, where he would study natural history, contribute to New-York newspapers, and cultivate literary friendships. Among the HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN romantic literary types whom he would seek to cultivate would be Washington Irving, Joseph Rodman Drake, James Fenimore Cooper, and Fitz-Greene Halleck.

(You will notice instantly that the exigencies of class would make it quite impossible for him ever to cultivate the likes of Henry Thoreau as part of such a clique.)

When the 1st person died of the cholera in his town, Friend John Cadbury the chocolate maker insisted on following in his “broad-brimmed hat and flowing Quaker frock-coat” as the hired laborers carried the coffin to the graveyard. This was at a time when other people were shunning the victims of the infection. Such burial workers smoked tobacco constantly while on such details, as their effort to ward off the disease or at least somewhat relieve their anxieties.

Friend John had installed a window made of panes of plate glass in his shop (rather than using the conventional panes of crown glass), one of the 1st local businesses to do so, and was employing an authentic Chinaman attired in an authentic Chinese national costume, to sit on display in the window and weigh and pack his tea. Hoo-hah! GLASS WINDOWS HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN

George W. Warren would write of the activities of his father Josiah Warren (1798-1874) the anarchist, during the public crisis of this year: Then in 1832 the cholera first made its appearance, and I well remember how my father set up his type and printed hand-bills cautioning the people how to live during the prevalence of that disease. These bills described the symptoms and how to treat them. Then I was allowed to go with my father to scatter the bills of caution along the streets, and I remember how proud I was when those who saw what my father was doing, shook hands with him so warmly. What with his work of printing precautionary notices and attending a large number of funerals with masonic lodges, firemen and other organizations requiring bands, my father was kept busy for days and weeks and months; there was scarcely an hour that a funeral didn't take place. Time went on, so did deaths, but our family lived through it. Fortunately the writer, being only six years of age, could not realize the state of affairs, nor the horror of the situation — he trotting along, scattering [and] broadcasting the “caution” notices, proud of telling how many papers he had given to the people each day. If the city records of 1832-1834 were not destroyed during the destruction of the court house some years ago, the thanks of the city alderman to him will be found recorded to Josiah Warren if I mistake not. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN

A peddler brought cholera up the canal to Rochester, New York, population 11,000, and 400 to 500 of them died, filling many of the city’s small cemeteries such as the 3 1/2 acre graveyard on Buffalo Street. One local resident, Ashbel Riley, buried 80 of the victims unaided. The Rochester Board of Health was established. The Monroe County Jail, called the “Blue Eagle Jail,” was built off Court St. between the west bank of the river and the Carroll-Fitzhugh raceway. It had a walled courtyard not only for prisoner exercise but also for executions.

Professor Richard Harlan was a member of a commission of physicians to Montréal, to collect information on the effective treatment of cholera. He became surgeon to the Philadelphia hospital. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN

In this year Friend Charles Farquhar, Sr. graduated from the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania and opened a practice in Alexandria, Virginia, where the city council immediately put this new physician in charge of their town’s struggle to deal with the ongoing epidemic.

The cholera outbreak of this year would give rise to at least one monument. It is atop a hill in Sheffield, England and commemorates 402 victims buried in grounds between Park Hill and Norfolk Park adjoining Clay Wood. The monument was designed by M.E. Hadfield and sculpted by Earp and Hobbs and would be complete in 1835. Its plaque names John Blake, Master Cutler, one of the victims, and notes that the foundation stone was laid by a poet, James Montgomery: HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN

1851

March 21, Friday: Modern Times, an individualistic, anarchistic utopia, was initiated on this day by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews on 750 acres of Long Island, New York. The governing ideas were to be those of “ sovereignty” and “individual responsibility.” All settlers were to be left alone to pursue their self- interest as they saw fit, with no resort to coercion. Everything produced by human labor was to be treated as the of the persons providing the labor. Exchange would be by an elaborate system of . All land transactions among the settlers were to be at cost, with no person ever to hold more than three acres. There would be no need for a police force, or judicial system, or jail, because complete individuality and self- mastery would of course make resort to such expedients forever unnecessary. This community would dissolve in 1857 and the area is now known as Brentwood; almost all the buildings that existed in the early years are long gone. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN

1907

March 8, Friday: Emma Goldman gave an interview to the Ohio State Journal in which she alleged grandiosely that “The doctrine of taught in this country was founded by Americans. It originated with men of the Concord School. “David Thoreau,” Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews were anarchists. They were associates of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Emerson. Those men were anarchists too.” In fact, as the interviewer ought to have explained to this Lithuanian immigrant, the actual identifiable American anarchists of that 19th-Century period had been Stephen Pearl Andrews, Colonel William Batchelder Greene, Ezra Heywood, Benjamin Ricketson Tucker, and Josiah Warren, that none of these men had been associated

in any way either with the town of Concord or with the Concord School (except that Lidian Emerson did receive, in 1843 in Concord, evidently by post, a gift of a volume of tales translated by Greene’s father), that these identified had had no detectable contact with or influence over Thoreau, and that in any event, Emerson, Garrison, Phillips, and Thoreau had not been, in any sense of the term, “anarchists.” Here in the case of Emma Goldman we have an example, pure and simple, of someone pretending to do influence study — and firing for effect.

Three Idylls for string quintet by Frank Bridge was performed for the initial time, in Bechstein Hall, London (a theme in the 2d idyll would be used by Benjamin Britten in his “Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge”). HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN

Of all the remarkable people associated with New Harmony, the most remarkable by far was Josiah Warren. Had he been a general, a politician, or a capitalist, he would have been one of the most famous of all Americans. He was a genuinely universal man — a talented musician accomplished on several instruments, a craftsman skilled in several crafts, an important inventor, an economist, philosopher, and founder of American individual anarchism — as a movement at least, since Thoreau was too individualistic to be the founder of a movement. Josiah Warren was born in Boston in 1798 of a well-known Pilgrim family. Not much is known of his early life, but in his teens he was making a living as a professional musician. At twenty he married and migrated to Cincinnati, the capital of the frontier, where he worked as an orchestra and band leader and teacher of music. Tallow and oil were in short supply, so he invented a lamp that burned lard and gave better light; soon he was running a lamp factory and became a moderately well-to-do man. In 1825 he sold the factory and accompanied Owen and his first settlers to New Harmony, where he became the leader of the band and taught music in the school — the community’s only two successful institutions. He also functioned as a general technical adviser and troubleshooter. Moreover, he was one of the few persons in the colony with any mechanical knowledge or skill. His philosophy had always been that the best way to understand a process was to learn to do it. At New Harmony he began his interest in printing. In 1827, as New Harmony disintegrated, he returned to Cincinnati. Of all the colonists, he was the only one, at least in a leading position, who seems to have learned anything. Most of them, like Frances Wright, were doomed to repeat the same mistakes and follies and end in the same disasters. Almost all critics of New Harmony have said that what it lacked was strong leadership, discipline, and commitment — strong government. Warren came to exactly the opposite conclusion. New Harmony had suffered from the disorderly exercise of freedom and the instability of Owen’s authority. On the principle of like cures like, he was convinced that the basis of all future reform must be complete individual . “Man seeks freedom as the magnet seeks the pole or water its level,” he wrote, “and society can have no peace until every member is really free.” But such a condition was not realizable under the existing organization and ideas of society. New views had to replace those of the past. For the future society new principles were needed. The first of these was “individual individuality.” The sovereignty of every individual at all times had to be held inviolable. Everyone necessarily was free to dispose of his person, his time, his property, and his reputation as he pleased — but always at his own cost. Josiah Warren had evolved a fairly comprehensive system of based on a , at first of the strictest interpretation, something like Marx’s, or rather Engels’s theory of labor power as distinguished from labor — all labor time was considered equivalent. Later, learning from what was in a sense a controlled scientific experiment, he came to HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN believe in a limited scale of values based on skill. Warren’s was the mind of a scientist and inventor. He immediately put the ideas he had evolved from his New Harmony experience into practical application. On May 18, 1827, an historic date, Josiah Warren opened a little general store at the corner of Fifth and Elm Streets in Cincinnati. He called it the Equity Store, but as soon as people found out about it, this became the most popular retail business in the city, and was known because of its method of computing price as the “time store.” Price was based on the principle of equal exchange of labor, measured by time occupied and exchange with other kinds of labor. All goods were marked with their cost plus overhead, usually about four percent. It was, incidentally, the first self-service business. The customer selected what he wished, brought it to the counter, the clerk computed the time spent in service, and the customer gave a labor note, “Due to Josiah Warren on demand, thirty minutes in carpenter work, John Smith” or, “Due to Josiah Warren on demand, ten minutes in needlework, Mary Brown.” Customers left orders for their needs, and these were posted each morning. Craftsmen and farmers brought their goods in accordance with the list of needs and exchanged them for other goods or for labor notes, in accordance with a list of the cost and labor time for all staple articles. Beyond these simple arrangements there were practically no other rules and regulations. The store functioned automatically as a market for both buyers and sellers and as a labor exchange and bureau. The first week it did only five dollars’ worth of business, but in a short time the store was thriving. And the remarkable thing was that highly skilled craftsmen and professional men were willing to exchange their labor with others on a simple time basis, although later Warren would modify this arrangement somewhat. The store soon came to function also as an interest-free credit union, and loans in labor and commodities and eventually money, if absolutely necessary, were made without interest and no other charge than the labor cost of handling. Warren was eventually able to embark upon a moderate cooperative real-estate venture, based on the funds in labor and money of the time cost. All this was done when Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the generally considered founder of individual anarchy, mutual credit, and cooperative labor exchange, was still a schoolboy. Warren not only anticipated Proudhon, but he was a far clearer thinker and writer, and a man who believed in testing all of his theories in practice. Marx was right about Proudhon. He was a confused thinker and a confusing writer and far from being a practical man. After three years of most successful operation of the Time Store, Josiah Warren decided that he had proved his point, the scientific experiment had justified the hypothesis, and in 1830 he closed out the business and went to New York to work with and Frances Wright on The Free Inquirer. In about six months he returned to Ohio. In the next few years he attempted to found , which never got started, due to factors beyond his control. He ran another “time store” at New Harmony, and on the side, as it were, made several profitable inventions in printing machinery, culminating in the first rotary press. In 1847 he took over the leadership of a Fourierist phalanstery on the Ohio, about thirty miles above Cincinnati, HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN which he renamed Utopia. It operated for about four years until the settlers sold out at a profit and migrated to Minnesota, where they disappear from history. In 1850 Josiah Warren moved to New York City and joined forces with Steven Pearl Andrews, who became the chief propagandist for Warren’s principles. These included the sovereignty of the individual, cost the limit of price, equitable commerce, and, eventually, mutual banking: in other words, the well-developed theory of individual anarchism or mutualism, which would survive as a small movement until well into the twentieth century, and which was certainly a much better worked-out general theory of free association than Proudhon’s similar system. In the same year Josiah Warren, Andrews, and others began the community of Modern Times, now called Brentwood, on Long Island about 40 miles from New York. Due to Warren’s principles, it is easy to confuse Modern Times with a cooperative real-estate development. Each family owned its own house and there was no regular form of government. Where New Harmony had failed, due to its open-door policy and the long struggle between Owen’s authority and the factionalism of cranks and the parasitism of loafers, Warren’s Modern Times solved these problems by ignoring them, by exercising no authority whatever. The cranks and loafers came, but in a short time eliminated themselves. of consumption was ensured by a “time store,” but the colony was never able to achieve communism of production except in agriculture. There was never sufficient capital to start a successful manufacturing business. A paper-box factory was attempted and was quite successful for a few years but was wiped out in the financial panic of 1857. The colony never really died, but slowly withered away to become a model village suburban to New York. In his old age Warren moved to Boston and died there in 1874 at the age of seventy-six. For another generation the movement he founded was a small but significant factor in American . The principal voice of individual anarchism and mutualism was Benjamin R. Tucker (author of In Place of a Book, by a Man too Busy to Write One, the best exposition of individual anarchism), whose magazine Liberty lasted into the twentieth century; and Warren’s principles of community organization were adopted in modified form by various communalist villages in both Great Britain and America. Mutual banking associations survive to the present day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: July 26, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

JOSIAH WARREN JOSIAH WARREN the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.