The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
It was 77 years ago this month, October 7, 1933 to be exact, that Joseph A. Labadee died.
He died at the age of 83 in Detroit, Michigan, where he had lived almost his entire adult
life.
Labadee was born in 1850 in a portion of southwestern Michigan that was inhabited at that time mostly
by the few remaining members of the Potawatomi Indian tribe who had not been, as Labadee's
biographer Carlotta Anderson puts it, callously rounded up by the United States government
a decade or so before and herded west across the Mississippi River.
Anderson writes that Labadee himself was of French and Native American heritage.
His French ancestors were already in the New World by 1667.
They owned land on the Detroit River prior to 1749.
His parents were first cousins.
Both bore the surname Labadie.
Both were descendants of Antoine-Louis de Comte de Labadie, one of the most prominent
and prolific French settlers in 18th century Detroit, a prosperous fur trader, variously
Joseph's father came down the family line from Antoine-Louise's second wife, a full-blooded
Ojibwe, daughter of the chief of a band whose hunting grounds were along the Detroit River.
His mother was raised in the spacious frame house her father built on the vast Labadee
estate in East Sandwich, on the Canadian side of the Detroit River, on land conveyed by
the Ottawa chief Pontiac in the mid-18th century.
When his parents met, his father was working as a carpenter and house painter, but only
off and on, when he had to.
The work he liked best was traveling with the Jesuit missionaries in the western part
of the State, serving as an interpreter between the Jesuits, whether English-speaking or French-speaking,
and the Potawatomi Indians of southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana.
Both French and English were spoken in Labadee's childhood home, which was sometimes out in
the woods of southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana among the Indians of that region,
sometimes in South Bend, Indiana, and sometimes in Canada, along the southern bank of the
Detroit River.
So it's a good bet that his parents, when they gave him his full name, probably thought
of it as it would be if pronounced in the French style, Charles-Joseph-Antoine Labadie.
It was he himself, or so it would appear, who Americanized it to plain Joe Labadie,
though he did retain a bit of exoticism by habitually spelling his first name just J-O,
with no terminal E.
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.
He seems to have learned to read and write at home, presumably from his mother.
After that, he seems to have taken charge of his own education, which he conducted mostly by independent reading.
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.
After fulfilling the terms of his new apprenticeship, he took off for five years of wandering through Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.
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.
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.
He returned to Michigan in 1872 and took up residence on the American side of the Detroit
River in the city of Detroit, then a bustling prosperous town of about 85,000 souls.
He worked as a printer for diverse publications and job-printing establishments around the
town for the next two decades.
In the process, he immersed himself in politics, and specifically in the 19th century American
labor movement.
At the very first newspaper job he had held after leaving South Bend for his five years
of travel at the age of merely 18, he had helped found the local Typographical Union,
and he continued his labor organizing and labor agitation in the years that followed,
most notably after his return to Detroit in the early 1870s.
Carlotta Anderson says that by the late 19th century he had become Michigan's most influential
labor agitator.
Now union activism may seem an odd sort of project for any sort of libertarian to choose
to undertake.
If Labadee had had a firmer grasp of economics, he would have seen the long-term futility
of such activism.
He would have seen that unions can never improve working conditions or wages beyond the level
the market would attain anyway.
But as one of Labadee's friends said at his funeral, Joe was a man who could see something
and good in every movement that was opposed to the present system.
According to Anderson, Labadee was a crusader for the Socialist Labor Party, the Knights
of Labor, the Greenback Party, the American Federation of Labor, the Single Tax Movement
and the Eight Hour Movement.
Above all, for 50 years he promoted his brand of nonviolent anarchism in pursuit of liberating
the individual.
In his effort to promote these various causes, Anderson writes, Labadee prolifically wrote,
edited and published for the radical and daily press, was a popular speaker at demonstrations,
meetings, rallies and forums, and maintained a lively and often contentious correspondence
with such figures as Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs, Samuel Gompers, Albert and Lucy Parsons,
Benjamin Tucker, Joseph Buchanan, Alexander Berkman, Terrence Powderly, and Henry George.
As is doubtless clear from that list of Labadee's enthusiasms—the Socialist Labor Party, the
Knights of Labor, the Greenback Party, the American Federation of Labor, the Single Tax
Movement and the Eight Hour Movement—Labadee did not begin the political part of his career
Throughout the 1870s and into the early 1880s, up to the time he was nearly 35 years old,
he regarded himself as what we would call today a state socialist.
He advocated policies like prohibition of child labor before the age of 14 and equal
pay for equal work for both sexes.
He advocated government sanitary inspections of factories, setting up government bureaus
Those of labor statistics and a graduated income tax.
As his early enthusiasm for the Greenback party suggests, he advocated government inflation
of the currency in order to produce what he thought would be prosperity.
But Labadee's primary focus was never on particular policy issues.
It was always on broad theories of politics and economics, the bigger picture, and on
the need for workers to educate themselves.
Anderson reports, for example, that Labadee believed a main objective of the Knights of
Labor was education, bringing working people together into a labor fraternity for the purpose
of discussing social science and their rights and duties to each other.
No one would ever think of putting a law case into the hands of anyone who had never studied
law, Labadee argued.
No one can ever hope to win the case of social progress unless they know the laws of political
economy.
With only a few months of formal education behind him, Labadee himself was reading the
writings of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ferdinand LaSalle, Thomas Paine and Francois
Guizot.
That's what Labadee was reading in the late 1870s.
A few years later, in 1881, he began reading a brand new paper published in Boston by a
man named Benjamin R. Tucker, who described himself as an anarchist.
Carlotta Anderson reports that Labadee was a reader of Liberty from its first issue.
By 1882, a year later, Labadee was telling an audience of 5,000 at a Detroit labor rally
that Tom Paine said that government, even in its best state, was an evil.
According to Anderson, he told the same audience that legislatures and other law-making bodies
were for those not big enough to take care of themselves.
The following year, 1883, saw Labadee making opening remarks at a controversial Detroit
appearance by the notorious German immigrant anarchist Johann Most, who openly advocated
violence to achieve anarchist objectives.
Anderson writes that Labadee, who believed in nonviolent methods, was not himself a fan
of Most.
But he asked the audience to abandon preconceived notions and its sphere of agitation, for,
as he put it, where there is agitation, there is always hope for a better future.
The truly dangerous members of the community, he warned, were those seeking to prohibit
Most's speech.
Another year, and it was 1884, the year Labadee decided Tucker and the individualist anarchists
were right.
People should be free to, in Labadey's words, do their own business at their own cost.
His former colleagues in the Socialist Labour Party were critical of his change of heart,
of course.
One party publication dismissed anarchism as a cheap bait for dupes to swallow and contrary
to the laws of nature.
But Labadey, unsurprisingly, stuck to his guns.
Only dead men and fools, he said, never change their minds.
Labadee changed his mind once again during the first few years of the 20th century, when
he again followed Benjamin R. Tucker, this time in abandoning the concepts of natural
law and natural rights.
Labadee had previously cited these as the basis for his philosophy, Anderson writes,
but along with Tucker, he now rejected such quasi-religious myths as he now saw them,
Replacing them with the concept of egoism, derived from the views of German philosopher
Max Stirner.
Tucker's and Labadee's new view held that self-interest was the only motivating force
in human conduct.
There was no absolute right or wrong.
Individuals were free to seek happiness however they liked, but since they would bear the
social consequences of their acts, they were likely to find it useful to live in harmony
Ironically, the same year Labadee decided he was an individualist anarchist, 1884, was
the year he accepted his first government job.
This one, as a clerk with the Michigan Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, lasted
only a year.
During that year, he lived in Lansing, the state capital, where he also moonlighted as
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.
This job lasted 30 years.
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.
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.
Anarchist leader Benjamin Tucker, however, saw no harm in it, and noted in a letter to Labadee that,
I make it a point to get all that I can out of my oppressors,
provided I do not thereby too seriously impair my power of struggle against them.
Labadee did come in for some criticism and ridicule for his decision to accept a civil service job,
but not as much as he had feared.
By 1894, when he took the job, he was 44 years old, and had lived in Detroit for more than 20 years.
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.
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.
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.
Labadee had gradually built a local reputation of a sort, and it was a good sort. People liked Joe Labadee.
By 1894, according to Anderson, they were coming to regard Labadee as a sort of charming eccentric, cantankerous and irreverent, but venerable.
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.
Fractions.
On two occasions, high-ranking officials in the city government became enraged to discover
that a city employee was writing articles and columns arguing for the abolition of all
government and had labity fired.
In both cases, a storm of popular protest forced his reinstatement and caused significant
political problems for the officials responsible.
Though he devoted much of his life to writing, editing, publishing and political activism,
it isn't really for any of these activities that Joe Labadee should be remembered fondly
by libertarians in the 21st century.
Rather, it was his tendency never to throw anything away.
Anderson reports that Labadee's biography can be written in vivid detail because of
the wealth of material he and his wife saved.
The conviction that he was engaged in events likely to transform the social and economic
system imbued him with an acute sense of history.
He was also an irrepressible pack rat.
According to one of Labadee's lifelong friends, he seldom, if ever, threw away any printed
matter having to do with labor conditions and radical propaganda, no matter how trivial
it might seem to be.
and his wife Sophie enthusiastically aided and abetted him in this vice.
Anderson writes that over 55 years of marriage, she carefully preserved every scrap of paper
concerning Joe and conscientiously stored all the labor or radical materials that came
into Joe's hands.
As a result, as Anderson puts it, the story of his life, deeds and thoughts is abundantly
revealed through the treasure trove of letters, periodicals, clippings, manuscripts, booklets,
photos and circulars once stored in his attic and now housed in the Labadee Collection of
the University of Michigan.
His stockpile of documents of social protest has proved a boon to scholars, enabling them
to study the early labor movement in detail and draw on rich source materials representing
a multitude of radical causes.
The two largest and most important collections of books, periodicals and papers relating
to the libertarian tradition in the United States are the Labadee Collection at the University
of Michigan and the Collection on American Individualism at the Hoover Institution at
Stanford University.
My own experience talking with libertarians over the years is that most of them, like
most Americans generally, know at least a little bit about Herbert Hoover, for whom
from the Hoover Institution was named, but not many know as much about Joe Labadee.
Here's hoping this modest piece wins him a tad more fame.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.