WEBVTT

NOTE Benjamin Tucker: American Individualist Anarchist

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The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with

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Jeff Brigenbach.

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The land where the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts now stands, on Buzzards Bay, on the south

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Massachusetts coast, quick geography lesson for those who don't know the area well.

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If you head southeast across Buzzards Bay from New Bedford, what you reach on the other side

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of the bay is the Elizabeth Islands.

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If you keep going southeast, you cross Vineyard Sound and wind up on Martha's Vineyard.

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Okay, are we all oriented now?

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As I was saying then, the land where the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts now stands was

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purchased from the chief of the local Wampanoag Indian tribe by settlers from Plymouth Colony

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in 1652. 200 years later, in the early 1850s, New Bedford was a prosperous metropolis of

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around 25,000 people, whose local boosters liked to call it the whaling capital of the

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world. It undeniably was, as Wikipedia puts it, one of the most important whaling ports

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in the world. The opening scenes of Herman Melville's Moby Dick take place in New Bedford.

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They were written there, in fact.

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David de Leon, the well-known intellectual historian who teaches at Washington, D.C.'s

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Howard University, reports in his book, The American as Anarchist, Reflections on Indigenous

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Radicalism, that in 1857 New Bedford could boast half the entire American whaling fleet

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of 655 ships.

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According to De Leon, by 1860 New Bedford was perhaps the wealthiest city per capita

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in New England, and was one of the most socially and intellectually well endowed towns of

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the entire region.

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New Bedford, De Leon writes, was a complex city of the world.

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Its wealth and diversity produced everything from polyglot boarding houses and brothels

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to some of the highest forms of rationalist religion.

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What were known then as advanced ideas were popular in New Bedford as well.

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The town served as a terminus of the Underground Railroad.

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An escaped slave named Frederick Bailey arrived there via the Underground Railroad in 1838

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and stayed on for three years.

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During that time he changed his name to Frederick Douglas and became an abolitionist writer,

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editor and lecturer.

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Ten years after his departure, New Bedford was still a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment.

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Douglas returned there frequently to lecture.

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Other prominent abolitionists of the day, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips,

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for example, lectured there regularly as well.

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Living in and around New Bedford in those pre-Civil War years was a whaling outfitter,

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later a wholesale and retail grocer, named Ebner Tucker.

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William O. Reichert claims in his book Partisans of Freedom, a study in American anarchism,

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that Tucker had something of a local reputation as a rebel because he had been shown the door

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by the Quakers for marrying outside the faith, although in his politics he was only a Jeffersonian

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Democrat, a stance that would be regarded as pretty radical in our day and age, but

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seemed far less so to Americans in the 1850s.

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A local newspaper, The New Bedford Signal, praised Abner Tucker, according to Reichert,

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as a liberal-minded man in religion as well as politics, and a notable reasoner upon the

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issues of the time. Reichert contends that Tucker's wife, Caroline

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Cummings, was a radical in her own right. David de Leon agrees. Caroline Cummings, according

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Going to De Leon had been raised by a pronounced admirer of the individualism of Thomas Paine,

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who had encouraged his daughter to achieve an intensive education.

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Later, in her home, she welcomed radical guests, the literature of social change, and the ideas

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of the new science, expressed by Darwin, Spencer, Buckle, Huxley and Tyndall.

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When Ebner and Caroline's son, Benjamin R. Tucker, was born into this comfortable book-laden

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environment in April of 1854, he seemed, as William O. Reichard puts it, to have been

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destined for a life of nonconformity and dissent from the very start.

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And that's just the way things worked out in practice.

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By the time he was 18, as Tucker himself put it, I had been an atheist, a materialist,

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an evolutionist, a free trader, a champion of the legal eight-hour day, a woman-suffragist,

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an enemy of marriage, and a believer in sexual freedom.

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By the time he was 18, though, Benjamin Tucker had left New Bedford behind him.

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An intellectually precocious student, he had graduated from high school at 16.

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Family tradition dictated that his next step be a move up to Cambridge, where he would

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enroll in Harvard.

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But young Tucker balked at that.

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Harvard's curriculum was the traditional college curriculum of that era, based on the classics,

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studied in the original Latin and Greek.

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Benjamin Tucker felt he had already had more than enough of this at his prep school, the

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New Bedford Friends Academy.

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He wanted to focus on modern ideas, modern issues, modern times.

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and his long familiarity with the ideas of men like Darwin and Huxley had convinced him

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that a scientific curriculum would be more worth his while.

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Finally, as David de Leon notes, at this time compulsory attendance at prayers was still

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enforced at Harvard.

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The 16-year-old Benjamin R. Tucker decided to enroll instead in an engineering program

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at a much newer school, a school first established only 9 years before, the Massachusetts Institute

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of Technology, MIT, at its original campus in Back Bay, Boston. MIT didn't move across

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the Charles River to Cambridge until 1916. Tucker spent three years at MIT, but, according

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to de Leon, he really devoted himself to study of the MIT curriculum only when his time was

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was not taken by plays, readings, concerts, reform lectures, and other activities that

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he regarded as more important.

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Just how much he learned at MIT is therefore uncertain.

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In the early 1890s, when he was in his mid-30s, he spent a couple of years editing an engineering

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magazine, so he must have picked up a thing or two during those three years.

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He Left Without a Degree in 1873 at the age of 19.

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The American journalist and editor Burton Rasko used to say that he left the University

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of Chicago in 1913 without a degree because he found that going to school was interfering

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with his education.

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Much the same seems to have been true of Benjamin R. Tucker with respect to MIT.

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His plays, readings, concerts and reform lectures to which de Leon refers were introducing him

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to books, works and ideas that he found fascinating but which were not included in his classes

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at MIT.

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As a 16-year-old freshman, for example, he had become aware of the notorious crusader

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for free love and women's rights, Victoria Woodhull, who had been the first woman ever

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to testify before Congress on the issue of women's suffrage.

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She had also been the first woman, along with her sister, Tennie Claflin, to operate a brokerage

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firm on Wall Street.

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The two sisters had used their profits from investments to launch a newspaper, Woodhull

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and Claflin's Weekly, that polemicized on behalf of free love and women's rights, including,

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and, of course, women's suffrage, as well as such related causes as sex education, short skirts,

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licensed prostitution and birth control, and a few unrelated causes, like spiritualism and vegetarianism.

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Woodhallen Claflints Weekly was published from 1870 to 1876.

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At its peak it had around 20,000 subscribers, one of whom was the teenage MIT student Benjamin R. Tucker,

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In 1872, the year Benjamin Tucker turned 18, Woodhull became the first woman ever to run

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for President of the United States.

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She ran on the Equal Rights Party ticket.

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Her vice presidential running mate was the former slave-turned-abolitionist who had spent

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some time in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass.

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When Tucker learned that Woodhull was being denied required permits by town and city governments

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18-year-old Tucker to bed. She also hired him as her tour manager. Then, after the

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campaign was over, as William O. Reichert tells the tale, Tucker joined the

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melange of lovers and social reformers who hung out at the Wood Hall

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Establishment in New York, accompanying that colorful troop to Europe in the

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summer of 1874, paying for his own passage from funds given him by his

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Victoria Woodhull was far from the only important teacher Tucker met off-campus in the early

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1870s.

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He himself wrote late in his life that the innumerable lectures to which I listened in

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the years 1870 and 1871 were very interesting and stimulating, and made me familiar with

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with many notable figures, some of which I recognized afterwards in my daily walks.

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Indeed I might almost say that the day was an exception when I did not pass in the street

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either Ralph Waldo Emerson or Wendell Phillips or Oliver Wendell Holmes or Charles Sumner

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or A. Bronson Alcott, Alcott's daughter Louisa, the author of Little Women or Julia Ward Howe

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or Lucy Stone or the poet Longfellow or Henry James the Elder or Colonel T.W. Higginson

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or President Elliott of Harvard.

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And then there were the individualist anarchists, Ezra Haywood, Josiah Warren and Lysander Spooner,

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all of whom Tucker met at local reform lectures in and around Boston.

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He had met another of their number, Stephen Pearl Andrews, who was part of Victoria Woodhall's

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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.

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He remained an atheist, a materialist, an evolutionist, a free trader, a woman suffragist, an enemy of marriage, and a believer in sexual freedom.

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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.

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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.

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What Benjamin R. Tucker really wanted to do with himself, he now began to realize, was to devote himself entirely to individual liberty,

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and spend all his time writing and editing and publishing books and pamphlets pushing these ideas he had learned from the individualist anarchists.

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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

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and Ezra Haywood had given him work on his radical paper, The Word, doing everything from writing and editing to running the printing press.

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Press. But it was increasingly clear that he needed a full-time job. He was, after all,

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getting on in years. In April of 1878, he was 24 years old. As it happened, the experience

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he'd got on the word got him in the door at the Boston Globe, where he spent the next

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11 years, first as a printer, then as a proofreader, editor and editorial writer. In the early

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In the 1890s, he moved to New York, where he held editorial positions on at least two

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different magazines.

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And all the while, from 1881 on, in his spare time, he was writing, editing and publishing

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a fortnightly paper called Liberty.

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He published it for more than 25 years, all told, and in that time built it into one of

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the largest circulation and most influential and respected anarchist publications in the

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world.

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He also published many books, including his own translations of key works by Proudhon,

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Bakunin and Tolstoy.

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For most of those years, he subsidized these consistently money-losing publishing operations

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out of his own pocket, using the money he earned at his day job as a journalist.

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After his parents had both died, by then he was in his early fifties, he inherited enough

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of Money to, in effect, retire and devote his full time to what had been for many years

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his hobby.

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He wasn't rich, but he could now afford to live at least as well as he had grown accustomed

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to living while devoting his full time to the money-losing, non-profit libertarian work

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he wanted to do, and he didn't have to work for money in order to make all this possible.

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With some of his inheritance, Tucker founded Benjamin R. Tucker's Unique Book Shop at

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502 6th Avenue in Manhattan, a shop that, during the short time it was open, attracted

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a varied clientele, including anarchist Emma Goldman and playwright Eugene O'Neill.

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The next time you watch Warren Beatty's Reds, imagine Maureen Stapleton and Jack Nicholson

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Strolling back over to Jack Reed's Greenwich Village apartment from Benjamin R. Tucker's

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Unique Bookshop.

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A few blocks away from the shop, in a building on 4th Avenue, Tucker stored his overstock,

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including all his copies of the dozens of books he had published, and the typesetting

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and printing equipment he used to publish those books, to say nothing of his fortnightly

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paper Liberty and the Unique Bookshop's mail-order catalogs.

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When the building on 4th Avenue went up in flames in January of 1908, Tucker lost everything.

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He had been uninsured.

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He decided, after giving the matter due thought, that he could live more comfortably on his

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inheritance in France than in the United States, since the cost of living was much lower in

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France.

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So, he, along with Pearl Johnson, his girlfriend we would call her today, or perhaps his common-law

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He never published another thing.

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And this was too bad, because the ideas he had published in Liberty were well worth spreading

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and popularizing.

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All the affairs of men, Tucker wrote, should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations,

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and the state should be abolished.

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Legal marriage and legal divorce, he wrote, were equal absurdities.

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As far as Tucker was concerned, all men and women had the right to love each other for

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for as long or as short a time as they can, will or may.

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According to William Gary Klein writing in his book The Individualist Anarchists, Tucker

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rejected compulsory education, arguing that schooling should be paid for as a commodity

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by those who patronize such facilities.

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Protection from invasion, likewise Tucker taught, should be based upon voluntary association

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or paid for like any commodity.

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Tucker wrote that anarchism favors peace, and according to William O. Reichert, he

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opposed war because it destroys liberty.

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According to Reichert, Tucker could not even condone wars that might be fought in the name

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of liberty, for war always, in Tucker's words, breeds the spirit of authority with after-effects

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unforeseen and incalculable.

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But when World War I got underway, Tucker spoke out, not for peace, not against war,

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but for the allied cause in the conflict.

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In a December 1914 letter to the Detroit anarchist Joseph Labade, he wrote that,

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I favor the allies because I pity the Belgian people, because I admire the British influences

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that make for liberty, because I feel some, though I regret to say a declining concern

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for the Future of the American People, because I have a considerable sympathy for the people

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of Russia, and because I hate and fear the German people as a nation of domineering brutes

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bent on turning the whole world into a police-ridden paradise on the Prussian pattern.

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I have numerous other reasons for favoring the Allies, but the above is the main reason

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and a sufficient one.

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A few months earlier, in a letter sent to several of his friends, Tucker had written

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that Germany's onslaught on civilization in August 1914 confronted all liberty lovers

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with a horrible alternative, either to offer no resistance and thereby suffer at Germany's

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hand a well-nigh total and probably permanent annihilation of our liberties, or to resist

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and, to make the resistance effective, suffer at our own hands a partial and possibly only

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temporary annihilation or suspension of those liberties.

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I take it that any earnest man who could hesitate in his choice must be blinded or dazzled by

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idealism as to be incapable of interpreting the march of events with even the smallest

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degree of realism.

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For me, at any rate, there was but one road, and I took it promptly.

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From the start, I have favored war to the limit.

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War till Germany, rulers and people alike, shall be so whipped and stripped that never

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more shall she have the will or the power to renew aggression.

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In choosing this course, I deliberately accept, though with soreness of heart, the evils involved

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in it, to none of which I am more blind than any other pacifist.

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Among those evils I accept conscription, though conscription, which must commend itself to

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every believer in the State equally with taxation so far as principle is concerned, is entirely

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counter to my political philosophy.

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I accept also the incidental evil of having to cooperate for a limited time with a considerable

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number of brutes.

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This capitulation to the forces of evil, the dogs of war, this abandonment of his own principles

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was, of course, shameful.

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But it's not as though Tucker was the only important figure in the libertarian tradition

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ever to take such an action.

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Ludwig von Mises himself, who counseled his students to not give in to evil but proceed

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ever more boldly against it, said very similar things about World War II.

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Tucker, like Mises, is one of the greatest figures in the libertarian tradition, despite

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his weakness in the face of what seemed to him utter despair.

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Not only was Tucker the most eloquent of all 19th century libertarians, he was also the

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most clear-headed about what sorts of institutional infrastructure would be necessary to encourage

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the growth of a political movement for free markets and individual liberty.

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It is impossible to read through the back issues of liberty without noticing how similar it

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is to the internet message boards and email discussion groups of our own time.

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And once the unique bookshop was open, there was a place for at least those libertarians

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who were nearby to gather and exchange ideas and strategies in person.

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The late Samuel Edward Conkin III used to describe what Benjamin R. Tucker devoted his

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This is life to building as the first libertarian movement, and I think he was right to do so.

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This is Jeff Rigenbach.