The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Brigenbach.
The land where the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts now stands, on Buzzards Bay, on the south
Massachusetts coast, quick geography lesson for those who don't know the area well.
If you head southeast across Buzzards Bay from New Bedford, what you reach on the other side
of the bay is the Elizabeth Islands.
If you keep going southeast, you cross Vineyard Sound and wind up on Martha's Vineyard.
Okay, are we all oriented now?
As I was saying then, the land where the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts now stands was
purchased from the chief of the local Wampanoag Indian tribe by settlers from Plymouth Colony
in 1652. 200 years later, in the early 1850s, New Bedford was a prosperous metropolis of
around 25,000 people, whose local boosters liked to call it the whaling capital of the
world. It undeniably was, as Wikipedia puts it, one of the most important whaling ports
in the world. The opening scenes of Herman Melville's Moby Dick take place in New Bedford.
They were written there, in fact.
David de Leon, the well-known intellectual historian who teaches at Washington, D.C.'s
Howard University, reports in his book, The American as Anarchist, Reflections on Indigenous
Radicalism, that in 1857 New Bedford could boast half the entire American whaling fleet
of 655 ships.
According to De Leon, by 1860 New Bedford was perhaps the wealthiest city per capita
in New England, and was one of the most socially and intellectually well endowed towns of
the entire region.
New Bedford, De Leon writes, was a complex city of the world.
Its wealth and diversity produced everything from polyglot boarding houses and brothels
to some of the highest forms of rationalist religion.
What were known then as advanced ideas were popular in New Bedford as well.
The town served as a terminus of the Underground Railroad.
An escaped slave named Frederick Bailey arrived there via the Underground Railroad in 1838
and stayed on for three years.
During that time he changed his name to Frederick Douglas and became an abolitionist writer,
editor and lecturer.
Ten years after his departure, New Bedford was still a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment.
Douglas returned there frequently to lecture.
Other prominent abolitionists of the day, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips,
for example, lectured there regularly as well.
Living in and around New Bedford in those pre-Civil War years was a whaling outfitter,
later a wholesale and retail grocer, named Ebner Tucker.
William O. Reichert claims in his book Partisans of Freedom, a study in American anarchism,
that Tucker had something of a local reputation as a rebel because he had been shown the door
by the Quakers for marrying outside the faith, although in his politics he was only a Jeffersonian
Democrat, a stance that would be regarded as pretty radical in our day and age, but
seemed far less so to Americans in the 1850s.
A local newspaper, The New Bedford Signal, praised Abner Tucker, according to Reichert,
as a liberal-minded man in religion as well as politics, and a notable reasoner upon the
issues of the time. Reichert contends that Tucker's wife, Caroline
Cummings, was a radical in her own right. David de Leon agrees. Caroline Cummings, according
Going to De Leon had been raised by a pronounced admirer of the individualism of Thomas Paine,
who had encouraged his daughter to achieve an intensive education.
Later, in her home, she welcomed radical guests, the literature of social change, and the ideas
of the new science, expressed by Darwin, Spencer, Buckle, Huxley and Tyndall.
When Ebner and Caroline's son, Benjamin R. Tucker, was born into this comfortable book-laden
environment in April of 1854, he seemed, as William O. Reichard puts it, to have been
destined for a life of nonconformity and dissent from the very start.
And that's just the way things worked out in practice.
By the time he was 18, as Tucker himself put it, I had been an atheist, a materialist,
an evolutionist, a free trader, a champion of the legal eight-hour day, a woman-suffragist,
an enemy of marriage, and a believer in sexual freedom.
By the time he was 18, though, Benjamin Tucker had left New Bedford behind him.
An intellectually precocious student, he had graduated from high school at 16.
Family tradition dictated that his next step be a move up to Cambridge, where he would
enroll in Harvard.
But young Tucker balked at that.
Harvard's curriculum was the traditional college curriculum of that era, based on the classics,
studied in the original Latin and Greek.
Benjamin Tucker felt he had already had more than enough of this at his prep school, the
New Bedford Friends Academy.
He wanted to focus on modern ideas, modern issues, modern times.
and his long familiarity with the ideas of men like Darwin and Huxley had convinced him
that a scientific curriculum would be more worth his while.
Finally, as David de Leon notes, at this time compulsory attendance at prayers was still
enforced at Harvard.
The 16-year-old Benjamin R. Tucker decided to enroll instead in an engineering program
at a much newer school, a school first established only 9 years before, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, MIT, at its original campus in Back Bay, Boston. MIT didn't move across
the Charles River to Cambridge until 1916. Tucker spent three years at MIT, but, according
to de Leon, he really devoted himself to study of the MIT curriculum only when his time was
was not taken by plays, readings, concerts, reform lectures, and other activities that
he regarded as more important.
Just how much he learned at MIT is therefore uncertain.
In the early 1890s, when he was in his mid-30s, he spent a couple of years editing an engineering
magazine, so he must have picked up a thing or two during those three years.
He Left Without a Degree in 1873 at the age of 19.
The American journalist and editor Burton Rasko used to say that he left the University
of Chicago in 1913 without a degree because he found that going to school was interfering
with his education.
Much the same seems to have been true of Benjamin R. Tucker with respect to MIT.
His plays, readings, concerts and reform lectures to which de Leon refers were introducing him
to books, works and ideas that he found fascinating but which were not included in his classes
at MIT.
As a 16-year-old freshman, for example, he had become aware of the notorious crusader
for free love and women's rights, Victoria Woodhull, who had been the first woman ever
to testify before Congress on the issue of women's suffrage.
She had also been the first woman, along with her sister, Tennie Claflin, to operate a brokerage
firm on Wall Street.
The two sisters had used their profits from investments to launch a newspaper, Woodhull
and Claflin's Weekly, that polemicized on behalf of free love and women's rights, including,
and, of course, women's suffrage, as well as such related causes as sex education, short skirts,
licensed prostitution and birth control, and a few unrelated causes, like spiritualism and vegetarianism.
Woodhallen Claflints Weekly was published from 1870 to 1876.
At its peak it had around 20,000 subscribers, one of whom was the teenage MIT student Benjamin R. Tucker,
In 1872, the year Benjamin Tucker turned 18, Woodhull became the first woman ever to run
for President of the United States.
She ran on the Equal Rights Party ticket.
Her vice presidential running mate was the former slave-turned-abolitionist who had spent
some time in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass.
When Tucker learned that Woodhull was being denied required permits by town and city governments
18-year-old Tucker to bed. She also hired him as her tour manager. Then, after the
campaign was over, as William O. Reichert tells the tale, Tucker joined the
melange of lovers and social reformers who hung out at the Wood Hall
Establishment in New York, accompanying that colorful troop to Europe in the
summer of 1874, paying for his own passage from funds given him by his
Victoria Woodhull was far from the only important teacher Tucker met off-campus in the early
1870s.
He himself wrote late in his life that the innumerable lectures to which I listened in
the years 1870 and 1871 were very interesting and stimulating, and made me familiar with
with many notable figures, some of which I recognized afterwards in my daily walks.
Indeed I might almost say that the day was an exception when I did not pass in the street
either Ralph Waldo Emerson or Wendell Phillips or Oliver Wendell Holmes or Charles Sumner
or A. Bronson Alcott, Alcott's daughter Louisa, the author of Little Women or Julia Ward Howe
or Lucy Stone or the poet Longfellow or Henry James the Elder or Colonel T.W. Higginson
or President Elliott of Harvard.
And then there were the individualist anarchists, Ezra Haywood, Josiah Warren and Lysander Spooner,
all of whom Tucker met at local reform lectures in and around Boston.
He had met another of their number, Stephen Pearl Andrews, who was part of Victoria Woodhall's
He didn't give up all his other isms and causes, some of them yes, but not all. In fact, he managed to hang on to most of them.
He remained an atheist, a materialist, an evolutionist, a free trader, a woman suffragist, an enemy of marriage, and a believer in sexual freedom.
But he did give up his advocacy of the legal eight-hour day, as well as the enthusiasm he had once felt for the movement to promote temperance by stamping out saloons and intoxicating spirits.
He gave up his allegiance to any cause that called for, in his words, the subjection of any non-invasive individual to a will not his own.
What Benjamin R. Tucker really wanted to do with himself, he now began to realize, was to devote himself entirely to individual liberty,
and spend all his time writing and editing and publishing books and pamphlets pushing these ideas he had learned from the individualist anarchists.
But the time had come when he had to earn a living. He had come into a little money from the death of a family member
and Ezra Haywood had given him work on his radical paper, The Word, doing everything from writing and editing to running the printing press.
Press. But it was increasingly clear that he needed a full-time job. He was, after all,
getting on in years. In April of 1878, he was 24 years old. As it happened, the experience
he'd got on the word got him in the door at the Boston Globe, where he spent the next
11 years, first as a printer, then as a proofreader, editor and editorial writer. In the early
In the 1890s, he moved to New York, where he held editorial positions on at least two
different magazines.
And all the while, from 1881 on, in his spare time, he was writing, editing and publishing
a fortnightly paper called Liberty.
He published it for more than 25 years, all told, and in that time built it into one of
the largest circulation and most influential and respected anarchist publications in the
world.
He also published many books, including his own translations of key works by Proudhon,
Bakunin and Tolstoy.
For most of those years, he subsidized these consistently money-losing publishing operations
out of his own pocket, using the money he earned at his day job as a journalist.
After his parents had both died, by then he was in his early fifties, he inherited enough
of Money to, in effect, retire and devote his full time to what had been for many years
his hobby.
He wasn't rich, but he could now afford to live at least as well as he had grown accustomed
to living while devoting his full time to the money-losing, non-profit libertarian work
he wanted to do, and he didn't have to work for money in order to make all this possible.
With some of his inheritance, Tucker founded Benjamin R. Tucker's Unique Book Shop at
502 6th Avenue in Manhattan, a shop that, during the short time it was open, attracted
a varied clientele, including anarchist Emma Goldman and playwright Eugene O'Neill.
The next time you watch Warren Beatty's Reds, imagine Maureen Stapleton and Jack Nicholson
Strolling back over to Jack Reed's Greenwich Village apartment from Benjamin R. Tucker's
Unique Bookshop.
A few blocks away from the shop, in a building on 4th Avenue, Tucker stored his overstock,
including all his copies of the dozens of books he had published, and the typesetting
and printing equipment he used to publish those books, to say nothing of his fortnightly
paper Liberty and the Unique Bookshop's mail-order catalogs.
When the building on 4th Avenue went up in flames in January of 1908, Tucker lost everything.
He had been uninsured.
He decided, after giving the matter due thought, that he could live more comfortably on his
inheritance in France than in the United States, since the cost of living was much lower in
France.
So, he, along with Pearl Johnson, his girlfriend we would call her today, or perhaps his common-law
He never published another thing.
And this was too bad, because the ideas he had published in Liberty were well worth spreading
and popularizing.
All the affairs of men, Tucker wrote, should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations,
and the state should be abolished.
Legal marriage and legal divorce, he wrote, were equal absurdities.
As far as Tucker was concerned, all men and women had the right to love each other for
for as long or as short a time as they can, will or may.
According to William Gary Klein writing in his book The Individualist Anarchists, Tucker
rejected compulsory education, arguing that schooling should be paid for as a commodity
by those who patronize such facilities.
Protection from invasion, likewise Tucker taught, should be based upon voluntary association
or paid for like any commodity.
Tucker wrote that anarchism favors peace, and according to William O. Reichert, he
opposed war because it destroys liberty.
According to Reichert, Tucker could not even condone wars that might be fought in the name
of liberty, for war always, in Tucker's words, breeds the spirit of authority with after-effects
unforeseen and incalculable.
But when World War I got underway, Tucker spoke out, not for peace, not against war,
but for the allied cause in the conflict.
In a December 1914 letter to the Detroit anarchist Joseph Labade, he wrote that,
I favor the allies because I pity the Belgian people, because I admire the British influences
that make for liberty, because I feel some, though I regret to say a declining concern
for the Future of the American People, because I have a considerable sympathy for the people
of Russia, and because I hate and fear the German people as a nation of domineering brutes
bent on turning the whole world into a police-ridden paradise on the Prussian pattern.
I have numerous other reasons for favoring the Allies, but the above is the main reason
and a sufficient one.
A few months earlier, in a letter sent to several of his friends, Tucker had written
that Germany's onslaught on civilization in August 1914 confronted all liberty lovers
with a horrible alternative, either to offer no resistance and thereby suffer at Germany's
hand a well-nigh total and probably permanent annihilation of our liberties, or to resist
and, to make the resistance effective, suffer at our own hands a partial and possibly only
temporary annihilation or suspension of those liberties.
I take it that any earnest man who could hesitate in his choice must be blinded or dazzled by
idealism as to be incapable of interpreting the march of events with even the smallest
degree of realism.
For me, at any rate, there was but one road, and I took it promptly.
From the start, I have favored war to the limit.
War till Germany, rulers and people alike, shall be so whipped and stripped that never
more shall she have the will or the power to renew aggression.
In choosing this course, I deliberately accept, though with soreness of heart, the evils involved
in it, to none of which I am more blind than any other pacifist.
Among those evils I accept conscription, though conscription, which must commend itself to
every believer in the State equally with taxation so far as principle is concerned, is entirely
counter to my political philosophy.
I accept also the incidental evil of having to cooperate for a limited time with a considerable
number of brutes.
This capitulation to the forces of evil, the dogs of war, this abandonment of his own principles
was, of course, shameful.
But it's not as though Tucker was the only important figure in the libertarian tradition
ever to take such an action.
Ludwig von Mises himself, who counseled his students to not give in to evil but proceed
ever more boldly against it, said very similar things about World War II.
Tucker, like Mises, is one of the greatest figures in the libertarian tradition, despite
his weakness in the face of what seemed to him utter despair.
Not only was Tucker the most eloquent of all 19th century libertarians, he was also the
most clear-headed about what sorts of institutional infrastructure would be necessary to encourage
the growth of a political movement for free markets and individual liberty.
It is impossible to read through the back issues of liberty without noticing how similar it
is to the internet message boards and email discussion groups of our own time.
And once the unique bookshop was open, there was a place for at least those libertarians
who were nearby to gather and exchange ideas and strategies in person.
The late Samuel Edward Conkin III used to describe what Benjamin R. Tucker devoted his
This is life to building as the first libertarian movement, and I think he was right to do so.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.