WEBVTT NOTE Joseph A. Labadie (1850-1933) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.540 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with 2 00:00:09.540 --> 00:00:12.800 Jeff Rigenbach. 3 00:00:12.800 --> 00:00:21.840 It was 77 years ago this month, October 7, 1933 to be exact, that Joseph A. Labadee died. 4 00:00:21.840 --> 00:00:27.440 He died at the age of 83 in Detroit, Michigan, where he had lived almost his entire adult 5 00:00:27.440 --> 00:00:28.440 life. 6 00:00:28.440 --> 00:00:35.160 Labadee was born in 1850 in a portion of southwestern Michigan that was inhabited at that time mostly 7 00:00:35.160 --> 00:00:41.520 by the few remaining members of the Potawatomi Indian tribe who had not been, as Labadee's 8 00:00:41.520 --> 00:00:47.400 biographer Carlotta Anderson puts it, callously rounded up by the United States government 9 00:00:47.400 --> 00:00:52.680 a decade or so before and herded west across the Mississippi River. 10 00:00:52.680 --> 00:00:58.320 Anderson writes that Labadee himself was of French and Native American heritage. 11 00:00:58.320 --> 00:01:03.040 His French ancestors were already in the New World by 1667. 12 00:01:03.040 --> 00:01:08.020 They owned land on the Detroit River prior to 1749. 13 00:01:08.020 --> 00:01:10.400 His parents were first cousins. 14 00:01:10.400 --> 00:01:12.860 Both bore the surname Labadie. 15 00:01:12.860 --> 00:01:18.760 Both were descendants of Antoine-Louis de Comte de Labadie, one of the most prominent 16 00:01:18.760 --> 00:01:25.080 and prolific French settlers in 18th century Detroit, a prosperous fur trader, variously 17 00:01:25.080 --> 00:01:46.480 Joseph's father came down the family line from Antoine-Louise's second wife, a full-blooded 18 00:01:46.480 --> 00:01:53.000 Ojibwe, daughter of the chief of a band whose hunting grounds were along the Detroit River. 19 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:57.920 His mother was raised in the spacious frame house her father built on the vast Labadee 20 00:01:57.920 --> 00:02:04.080 estate in East Sandwich, on the Canadian side of the Detroit River, on land conveyed by 21 00:02:04.080 --> 00:02:08.340 the Ottawa chief Pontiac in the mid-18th century. 22 00:02:08.340 --> 00:02:13.140 When his parents met, his father was working as a carpenter and house painter, but only 23 00:02:13.140 --> 00:02:15.600 off and on, when he had to. 24 00:02:15.600 --> 00:02:20.200 The work he liked best was traveling with the Jesuit missionaries in the western part 25 00:02:20.200 --> 00:02:27.080 of the State, serving as an interpreter between the Jesuits, whether English-speaking or French-speaking, 26 00:02:27.080 --> 00:02:32.920 and the Potawatomi Indians of southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana. 27 00:02:32.920 --> 00:02:38.360 Both French and English were spoken in Labadee's childhood home, which was sometimes out in 28 00:02:38.360 --> 00:02:44.480 the woods of southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana among the Indians of that region, 29 00:02:44.480 --> 00:02:49.200 sometimes in South Bend, Indiana, and sometimes in Canada, along the southern bank of the 30 00:02:49.200 --> 00:02:50.560 Detroit River. 31 00:02:50.560 --> 00:02:55.320 So it's a good bet that his parents, when they gave him his full name, probably thought 32 00:02:55.320 --> 00:03:01.860 of it as it would be if pronounced in the French style, Charles-Joseph-Antoine Labadie. 33 00:03:01.860 --> 00:03:08.180 It was he himself, or so it would appear, who Americanized it to plain Joe Labadie, 34 00:03:08.180 --> 00:03:14.900 though he did retain a bit of exoticism by habitually spelling his first name just J-O, 35 00:03:14.900 --> 00:03:17.560 with no terminal E. 36 00:03:17.560 --> 00:03:28.560 He had no schooling, Anderson reports, except a few months in a parochial school near South Bend, Indiana, when his father briefly worked as a carpenter for the University of Notre Dame. 37 00:03:28.560 --> 00:03:33.560 He seems to have learned to read and write at home, presumably from his mother. 38 00:03:33.560 --> 00:03:40.560 After that, he seems to have taken charge of his own education, which he conducted mostly by independent reading. 39 00:03:40.560 --> 00:03:54.560 He left home at 14 and spent a couple of years apprenticed to an uncle in the jewelry business, learning the trade of watchmaking, before returning to South Bend and starting a new apprenticeship, this time in a printing shop. 40 00:03:54.560 --> 00:04:04.560 After fulfilling the terms of his new apprenticeship, he took off for five years of wandering through Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts. 41 00:04:04.560 --> 00:04:15.560 He picked up work where he could, often, Anderson reports, by standing in front of a newspaper office, prepared to fill in if one of the regular printers failed to show up. 42 00:04:15.560 --> 00:04:28.560 He spent a year as a printer for the New York World during this time, but most of his gigs were shorter-lived, lasting only a few weeks or months before he moved on to see what lay beyond the next horizon. 43 00:04:28.560 --> 00:04:35.820 He returned to Michigan in 1872 and took up residence on the American side of the Detroit 44 00:04:35.820 --> 00:04:43.020 River in the city of Detroit, then a bustling prosperous town of about 85,000 souls. 45 00:04:43.020 --> 00:04:47.620 He worked as a printer for diverse publications and job-printing establishments around the 46 00:04:47.620 --> 00:04:50.080 town for the next two decades. 47 00:04:50.080 --> 00:04:55.920 In the process, he immersed himself in politics, and specifically in the 19th century American 48 00:04:55.920 --> 00:04:57.380 labor movement. 49 00:04:57.380 --> 00:05:02.360 At the very first newspaper job he had held after leaving South Bend for his five years 50 00:05:02.360 --> 00:05:08.840 of travel at the age of merely 18, he had helped found the local Typographical Union, 51 00:05:08.840 --> 00:05:14.340 and he continued his labor organizing and labor agitation in the years that followed, 52 00:05:14.340 --> 00:05:19.120 most notably after his return to Detroit in the early 1870s. 53 00:05:19.120 --> 00:05:24.620 Carlotta Anderson says that by the late 19th century he had become Michigan's most influential 54 00:05:24.620 --> 00:05:26.680 labor agitator. 55 00:05:26.680 --> 00:05:32.180 Now union activism may seem an odd sort of project for any sort of libertarian to choose 56 00:05:32.180 --> 00:05:33.600 to undertake. 57 00:05:33.600 --> 00:05:38.520 If Labadee had had a firmer grasp of economics, he would have seen the long-term futility 58 00:05:38.520 --> 00:05:40.160 of such activism. 59 00:05:40.160 --> 00:05:45.680 He would have seen that unions can never improve working conditions or wages beyond the level 60 00:05:45.680 --> 00:05:48.160 the market would attain anyway. 61 00:05:48.160 --> 00:05:53.060 But as one of Labadee's friends said at his funeral, Joe was a man who could see something 62 00:05:53.060 --> 00:05:56.860 and good in every movement that was opposed to the present system. 63 00:05:56.860 --> 00:06:01.700 According to Anderson, Labadee was a crusader for the Socialist Labor Party, the Knights 64 00:06:01.700 --> 00:06:07.620 of Labor, the Greenback Party, the American Federation of Labor, the Single Tax Movement 65 00:06:07.620 --> 00:06:09.660 and the Eight Hour Movement. 66 00:06:09.660 --> 00:06:16.500 Above all, for 50 years he promoted his brand of nonviolent anarchism in pursuit of liberating 67 00:06:16.500 --> 00:06:18.620 the individual. 68 00:06:18.620 --> 00:06:24.420 In his effort to promote these various causes, Anderson writes, Labadee prolifically wrote, 69 00:06:24.420 --> 00:06:30.380 edited and published for the radical and daily press, was a popular speaker at demonstrations, 70 00:06:30.380 --> 00:06:36.460 meetings, rallies and forums, and maintained a lively and often contentious correspondence 71 00:06:36.460 --> 00:06:43.540 with such figures as Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Samuel Gompers, Albert and Lucy Parsons, 72 00:06:43.540 --> 00:06:51.100 Benjamin Tucker, Joseph Buchanan, Alexander Berkman, Terrence Powderly, and Henry George. 73 00:06:51.100 --> 00:06:56.900 As is doubtless clear from that list of Labadee's enthusiasms—the Socialist Labor Party, the 74 00:06:56.900 --> 00:07:02.220 Knights of Labor, the Greenback Party, the American Federation of Labor, the Single Tax 75 00:07:02.220 --> 00:07:07.460 Movement and the Eight Hour Movement—Labadee did not begin the political part of his career 76 00:07:07.460 --> 00:07:16.660 Throughout the 1870s and into the early 1880s, up to the time he was nearly 35 years old, 77 00:07:16.660 --> 00:07:21.240 he regarded himself as what we would call today a state socialist. 78 00:07:21.240 --> 00:07:26.860 He advocated policies like prohibition of child labor before the age of 14 and equal 79 00:07:26.860 --> 00:07:29.780 pay for equal work for both sexes. 80 00:07:29.780 --> 00:07:35.020 He advocated government sanitary inspections of factories, setting up government bureaus 81 00:07:35.020 --> 00:07:38.920 Those of labor statistics and a graduated income tax. 82 00:07:38.920 --> 00:07:43.940 As his early enthusiasm for the Greenback party suggests, he advocated government inflation 83 00:07:43.940 --> 00:07:49.100 of the currency in order to produce what he thought would be prosperity. 84 00:07:49.100 --> 00:07:54.020 But Labadee's primary focus was never on particular policy issues. 85 00:07:54.020 --> 00:08:00.020 It was always on broad theories of politics and economics, the bigger picture, and on 86 00:08:00.020 --> 00:08:03.180 the need for workers to educate themselves. 87 00:08:03.180 --> 00:08:07.500 Anderson reports, for example, that Labadee believed a main objective of the Knights of 88 00:08:07.500 --> 00:08:13.660 Labor was education, bringing working people together into a labor fraternity for the purpose 89 00:08:13.660 --> 00:08:18.300 of discussing social science and their rights and duties to each other. 90 00:08:18.300 --> 00:08:23.060 No one would ever think of putting a law case into the hands of anyone who had never studied 91 00:08:23.060 --> 00:08:25.180 law, Labadee argued. 92 00:08:25.180 --> 00:08:31.020 No one can ever hope to win the case of social progress unless they know the laws of political 93 00:08:31.020 --> 00:08:32.360 economy. 94 00:08:32.360 --> 00:08:36.960 With only a few months of formal education behind him, Labadee himself was reading the 95 00:08:36.960 --> 00:08:43.080 writings of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ferdinand LaSalle, Thomas Paine and Francois 96 00:08:43.080 --> 00:08:44.080 Guizot. 97 00:08:44.080 --> 00:08:48.520 That's what Labadee was reading in the late 1870s. 98 00:08:48.520 --> 00:08:54.880 A few years later, in 1881, he began reading a brand new paper published in Boston by a 99 00:08:54.880 --> 00:09:00.560 man named Benjamin R. Tucker, who described himself as an anarchist. 100 00:09:00.560 --> 00:09:09.860 Carlotta Anderson reports that Labadee was a reader of Liberty from its first issue. 101 00:09:09.860 --> 00:09:16.880 By 1882, a year later, Labadee was telling an audience of 5,000 at a Detroit labor rally 102 00:09:16.880 --> 00:09:22.760 that Tom Paine said that government, even in its best state, was an evil. 103 00:09:22.760 --> 00:09:27.900 According to Anderson, he told the same audience that legislatures and other law-making bodies 104 00:09:27.900 --> 00:09:32.060 were for those not big enough to take care of themselves. 105 00:09:32.060 --> 00:09:38.100 The following year, 1883, saw Labadee making opening remarks at a controversial Detroit 106 00:09:38.100 --> 00:09:44.520 appearance by the notorious German immigrant anarchist Johann Most, who openly advocated 107 00:09:44.520 --> 00:09:47.940 violence to achieve anarchist objectives. 108 00:09:47.940 --> 00:09:53.580 Anderson writes that Labadee, who believed in nonviolent methods, was not himself a fan 109 00:09:53.580 --> 00:09:54.660 of Most. 110 00:09:54.660 --> 00:10:00.820 But he asked the audience to abandon preconceived notions and its sphere of agitation, for, 111 00:10:00.820 --> 00:10:06.360 as he put it, where there is agitation, there is always hope for a better future. 112 00:10:06.360 --> 00:10:11.480 The truly dangerous members of the community, he warned, were those seeking to prohibit 113 00:10:11.480 --> 00:10:13.820 Most's speech. 114 00:10:13.820 --> 00:10:20.020 Another year, and it was 1884, the year Labadee decided Tucker and the individualist anarchists 115 00:10:20.020 --> 00:10:21.980 were right. 116 00:10:21.980 --> 00:10:28.340 People should be free to, in Labadey's words, do their own business at their own cost. 117 00:10:28.340 --> 00:10:32.860 His former colleagues in the Socialist Labour Party were critical of his change of heart, 118 00:10:32.860 --> 00:10:34.180 of course. 119 00:10:34.180 --> 00:10:40.660 One party publication dismissed anarchism as a cheap bait for dupes to swallow and contrary 120 00:10:40.660 --> 00:10:42.500 to the laws of nature. 121 00:10:42.500 --> 00:10:46.460 But Labadey, unsurprisingly, stuck to his guns. 122 00:10:46.460 --> 00:10:51.580 Only dead men and fools, he said, never change their minds. 123 00:10:51.580 --> 00:10:56.600 Labadee changed his mind once again during the first few years of the 20th century, when 124 00:10:56.600 --> 00:11:02.260 he again followed Benjamin R. Tucker, this time in abandoning the concepts of natural 125 00:11:02.260 --> 00:11:05.020 law and natural rights. 126 00:11:05.020 --> 00:11:10.500 Labadee had previously cited these as the basis for his philosophy, Anderson writes, 127 00:11:10.500 --> 00:11:16.700 but along with Tucker, he now rejected such quasi-religious myths as he now saw them, 128 00:11:16.700 --> 00:11:21.940 Replacing them with the concept of egoism, derived from the views of German philosopher 129 00:11:21.940 --> 00:11:23.620 Max Stirner. 130 00:11:23.620 --> 00:11:28.760 Tucker's and Labadee's new view held that self-interest was the only motivating force 131 00:11:28.760 --> 00:11:30.440 in human conduct. 132 00:11:30.440 --> 00:11:34.420 There was no absolute right or wrong. 133 00:11:34.420 --> 00:11:38.780 Individuals were free to seek happiness however they liked, but since they would bear the 134 00:11:38.780 --> 00:11:44.160 social consequences of their acts, they were likely to find it useful to live in harmony 135 00:11:44.160 --> 00:11:58.280 Ironically, the same year Labadee decided he was an individualist anarchist, 1884, was 136 00:11:58.280 --> 00:12:01.680 the year he accepted his first government job. 137 00:12:01.680 --> 00:12:06.900 This one, as a clerk with the Michigan Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, lasted 138 00:12:06.900 --> 00:12:08.560 only a year. 139 00:12:08.560 --> 00:12:13.280 During that year, he lived in Lansing, the state capital, where he also moonlighted as 140 00:12:13.280 --> 00:12:32.280 The second government job Labadee accepted was offered to him a decade later in 1894 by the city of Detroit, which wondered if he might be interested in supervising work gangs of men laying pipe for the local water department. 141 00:12:32.280 --> 00:12:35.280 This job lasted 30 years. 142 00:12:35.280 --> 00:12:50.280 Anderson speculates that it might have been offered to Labadee at the behest of some of his former colleagues in radical politics who had moderated their views, become city officials, and learned of their old friend and comrade's financial situation. 143 00:12:50.280 --> 00:13:02.280 Anderson reports that although desperate for cash, Labadee hesitated to accept the city's offer. He foresaw that working for the government would be a serious embarrassment for an anarchist. 144 00:13:02.280 --> 00:13:09.280 Anarchist leader Benjamin Tucker, however, saw no harm in it, and noted in a letter to Labadee that, 145 00:13:09.280 --> 00:13:13.280 I make it a point to get all that I can out of my oppressors, 146 00:13:13.280 --> 00:13:19.280 provided I do not thereby too seriously impair my power of struggle against them. 147 00:13:19.280 --> 00:13:26.280 Labadee did come in for some criticism and ridicule for his decision to accept a civil service job, 148 00:13:26.280 --> 00:13:28.280 but not as much as he had feared. 149 00:13:28.280 --> 00:13:36.280 By 1894, when he took the job, he was 44 years old, and had lived in Detroit for more than 20 years. 150 00:13:36.280 --> 00:13:49.280 During all that time, he had been more or less in the public eye, as a labor agitator, labor organizer, editor and writer for radical papers, and speaker at demonstrations, rallies and meetings of various kinds. 151 00:13:49.280 --> 00:14:03.280 In 1884, the year of his conversion to individualist anarchism, Labadee had begun writing an occasional column, which he called Cranky Notions, and which unflinchingly promoted individualist anarchism. 152 00:14:03.280 --> 00:14:15.280 Cranky Notions had started out in a Detroit weekly called The Labor Leaf. By the early 90s, it was running not only in Benjamin R. Tucker's Liberty, but also in the Detroit News. 153 00:14:15.280 --> 00:14:23.280 Labadee had gradually built a local reputation of a sort, and it was a good sort. People liked Joe Labadee. 154 00:14:23.280 --> 00:14:32.280 By 1894, according to Anderson, they were coming to regard Labadee as a sort of charming eccentric, cantankerous and irreverent, but venerable. 155 00:14:32.280 --> 00:14:42.280 He was, she reports, commonly referred to as the gentle anarchist, and enjoyed his status as a town character, one of Detroit's municipal attractions. 156 00:14:42.280 --> 00:14:43.280 Fractions. 157 00:14:43.280 --> 00:14:48.720 On two occasions, high-ranking officials in the city government became enraged to discover 158 00:14:48.720 --> 00:14:54.040 that a city employee was writing articles and columns arguing for the abolition of all 159 00:14:54.040 --> 00:14:56.980 government and had labity fired. 160 00:14:56.980 --> 00:15:03.220 In both cases, a storm of popular protest forced his reinstatement and caused significant 161 00:15:03.220 --> 00:15:07.360 political problems for the officials responsible. 162 00:15:07.360 --> 00:15:12.920 Though he devoted much of his life to writing, editing, publishing and political activism, 163 00:15:12.920 --> 00:15:18.040 it isn't really for any of these activities that Joe Labadee should be remembered fondly 164 00:15:18.040 --> 00:15:21.040 by libertarians in the 21st century. 165 00:15:21.040 --> 00:15:25.680 Rather, it was his tendency never to throw anything away. 166 00:15:25.680 --> 00:15:30.840 Anderson reports that Labadee's biography can be written in vivid detail because of 167 00:15:30.840 --> 00:15:34.480 the wealth of material he and his wife saved. 168 00:15:34.480 --> 00:15:39.740 The conviction that he was engaged in events likely to transform the social and economic 169 00:15:39.740 --> 00:15:43.660 system imbued him with an acute sense of history. 170 00:15:43.660 --> 00:15:47.000 He was also an irrepressible pack rat. 171 00:15:47.000 --> 00:15:52.160 According to one of Labadee's lifelong friends, he seldom, if ever, threw away any printed 172 00:15:52.160 --> 00:15:57.700 matter having to do with labor conditions and radical propaganda, no matter how trivial 173 00:15:57.700 --> 00:15:59.480 it might seem to be. 174 00:15:59.480 --> 00:16:04.480 and his wife Sophie enthusiastically aided and abetted him in this vice. 175 00:16:04.480 --> 00:16:10.580 Anderson writes that over 55 years of marriage, she carefully preserved every scrap of paper 176 00:16:10.580 --> 00:16:16.880 concerning Joe and conscientiously stored all the labor or radical materials that came 177 00:16:16.880 --> 00:16:19.020 into Joe's hands. 178 00:16:19.020 --> 00:16:24.640 As a result, as Anderson puts it, the story of his life, deeds and thoughts is abundantly 179 00:16:24.640 --> 00:16:31.120 revealed through the treasure trove of letters, periodicals, clippings, manuscripts, booklets, 180 00:16:31.120 --> 00:16:37.240 photos and circulars once stored in his attic and now housed in the Labadee Collection of 181 00:16:37.240 --> 00:16:39.240 the University of Michigan. 182 00:16:39.240 --> 00:16:45.240 His stockpile of documents of social protest has proved a boon to scholars, enabling them 183 00:16:45.240 --> 00:16:51.160 to study the early labor movement in detail and draw on rich source materials representing 184 00:16:51.160 --> 00:16:54.340 a multitude of radical causes. 185 00:16:54.340 --> 00:16:59.860 The two largest and most important collections of books, periodicals and papers relating 186 00:16:59.860 --> 00:17:05.220 to the libertarian tradition in the United States are the Labadee Collection at the University 187 00:17:05.220 --> 00:17:10.620 of Michigan and the Collection on American Individualism at the Hoover Institution at 188 00:17:10.620 --> 00:17:12.620 Stanford University. 189 00:17:12.620 --> 00:17:17.220 My own experience talking with libertarians over the years is that most of them, like 190 00:17:17.220 --> 00:17:21.940 most Americans generally, know at least a little bit about Herbert Hoover, for whom 191 00:17:21.940 --> 00:17:27.940 from the Hoover Institution was named, but not many know as much about Joe Labadee. 192 00:17:27.940 --> 00:17:32.860 Here's hoping this modest piece wins him a tad more fame. 193 00:17:32.860 --> 00:17:33.700 This is Jeff Rigenbach.