WEBVTT NOTE Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:18.520 I have often referred in past episodes of this audio series to the fact that the libertarian 2 00:00:18.520 --> 00:00:24.960 movement of today dates from the early 1940s, the period of U.S. participation in World 3 00:00:24.960 --> 00:00:26.320 War II. 4 00:00:26.320 --> 00:00:32.140 It underwent a very sudden and very substantial spurt of growth during the late 1960s and 5 00:00:32.140 --> 00:00:36.780 early 1970s and has grown steadily ever since. 6 00:00:36.780 --> 00:00:42.180 There was an earlier libertarian movement in the United States, however, one I briefly 7 00:00:42.180 --> 00:00:48.580 mentioned a couple of months ago when observing Benjamin R. Tucker's 156th birthday. 8 00:00:48.580 --> 00:00:54.060 This first libertarian movement, as the late Samuel Edward Conkin III used to like to call 9 00:00:54.060 --> 00:00:59.500 was largely Tucker's creation centered around his fortnightly paper Liberty 10 00:00:59.500 --> 00:01:06.140 which he published from 1881 to 1908 and his bookstore Benjamin R. Tucker's 11 00:01:06.140 --> 00:01:12.020 unique bookshop which he operated at 502 6th Avenue near 30th Street in 12 00:01:12.020 --> 00:01:17.580 Manhattan for a couple of years during the first decade of the 20th century the 13 00:01:17.580 --> 00:01:22.140 libertarian I'd like to discuss in today's podcast was something of a star 14 00:01:22.140 --> 00:01:27.440 are in that first libertarian movement, though her works and even her name are pretty close 15 00:01:27.440 --> 00:01:29.440 to forgotten today. 16 00:01:29.440 --> 00:01:36.420 Voltairine de Clare was born November 17, 1866, just after the end of the American Civil 17 00:01:36.420 --> 00:01:44.060 War, in a town called Leslie, in rural central Michigan, about 20 miles south of Lansing. 18 00:01:44.060 --> 00:01:49.640 She was the elder of two daughters born to a French immigrant named Hector de Clare, 19 00:01:49.640 --> 00:01:56.040 who tried to earn a living as a tailor without much luck and his hapless wife, Harriet. 20 00:01:56.040 --> 00:02:00.200 Hector regarded himself as a liberal and a free thinker. 21 00:02:00.200 --> 00:02:03.720 And by liberal, of course, I mean classical liberal. 22 00:02:03.720 --> 00:02:06.360 This is the 1860s, remember. 23 00:02:06.360 --> 00:02:12.000 As a youth in northern France, he had read and deeply admired the works of Voltaire. 24 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:16.920 He decided to name his firstborn daughter after the eminent French author. 25 00:02:16.920 --> 00:02:21.880 He taught her to read and write both French and English, and he noticed not only that 26 00:02:21.880 --> 00:02:28.640 Volterine had high intelligence and an unusual talent for schoolwork of all kinds, but also 27 00:02:28.640 --> 00:02:33.540 that she was, as they used to say back then, high-spirited. 28 00:02:33.540 --> 00:02:39.400 In 1878, when Volterine was 12 years old, her father found himself face-to-face with 29 00:02:39.400 --> 00:02:41.760 an unexpected opportunity. 30 00:02:41.760 --> 00:02:47.360 If he were willing to move to Port Huron, a busy lumbering and shipbuilding town about 31 00:02:47.360 --> 00:02:53.700 120 miles east of Leslie, he could make a lot more money. His tailoring services were 32 00:02:53.700 --> 00:03:00.360 more needed there by far, and more appreciated. The problem was that his wife would not accompany 33 00:03:00.360 --> 00:03:07.080 him. Presumably, she found the bucolic atmosphere of a farm town more to her liking than a bustling 34 00:03:07.080 --> 00:03:15.880 In any case, Harriet remained in Leslie with Adelaide, her younger daughter. Hector moved 35 00:03:15.880 --> 00:03:21.440 to Port Huron with Volterine. He and his wife seemed to have agreed that this arrangement 36 00:03:21.440 --> 00:03:27.120 would be best given the circumstances. On what Hector could earn in Port Huron, he could 37 00:03:27.120 --> 00:03:32.800 support two households, and he could exert his authoritative influence to try to curb 38 00:03:32.800 --> 00:03:39.920 Hector served what he called Voltarene's restless nature and her marked tendency to willfulness. 39 00:03:39.920 --> 00:03:45.180 Within a year, Hector had decided to enroll his elder daughter in a highly rated convent 40 00:03:45.180 --> 00:03:52.680 school, the convent of Our Lady of Port Huron in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada, just across the 41 00:03:52.680 --> 00:03:56.120 Saint Clair river from Port Huron, Michigan. 42 00:03:56.120 --> 00:04:01.560 Hector seems to have been motivated in part by a simple desire to expose his intellectually 43 00:04:31.560 --> 00:04:55.480 Volterine resisted her father's decision with all the energy and wiles she could muster. 44 00:04:55.480 --> 00:05:01.800 She wrote letters, first mournful, then increasingly angry, to her mother, first begging, then 45 00:05:01.800 --> 00:05:03.640 demanding rescue. 46 00:05:03.640 --> 00:05:09.080 When it didn't come, she took matters into her own hands, running away from the convent, 47 00:05:09.080 --> 00:05:14.680 swimming across the river to Port Huron, then hiking nearly twenty miles west, toward her 48 00:05:14.680 --> 00:05:20.280 mother's house, before making the mistake of contacting some family friends, who she 49 00:05:20.280 --> 00:05:24.920 She hoped would offer her something to eat and a place to spend the night. 50 00:05:24.920 --> 00:05:30.040 Instead, they contacted her father and sent her back to the convent. 51 00:05:30.040 --> 00:05:34.400 Once there, she seemed to settle down and make the best of her situation. 52 00:05:34.400 --> 00:05:39.400 She excelled at her studies and graduated with honors four years later at the age of 53 00:05:39.400 --> 00:05:40.700 17. 54 00:05:40.700 --> 00:05:43.300 But inwardly, she never surrendered. 55 00:05:43.300 --> 00:05:48.920 She continued to regard herself as a prisoner, and as soon as she regained her freedom after 56 00:05:48.920 --> 00:05:54.200 After her graduation, she began working to undermine the institution that had imprisoned 57 00:05:54.200 --> 00:05:55.920 her for so long. 58 00:05:55.920 --> 00:06:00.900 She returned to Central Michigan, moved in with her mother, and began writing for a weekly 59 00:06:00.900 --> 00:06:04.740 freethought paper called The Progressive Age. 60 00:06:04.740 --> 00:06:09.520 Before long, she had joined the editorial staff of the paper, and as soon as her income 61 00:06:09.520 --> 00:06:14.720 was sufficient to support her, she left her mother's house for the last time and moved 62 00:06:14.720 --> 00:06:17.700 to Grand Rapids in Western Michigan. 63 00:06:17.700 --> 00:06:23.580 One thing led to another. Her articles in the Progressive Age led to speaking engagements, 64 00:06:23.580 --> 00:06:30.920 and not many months had gone by before Volterine DeClair, a mere girl of 19 or 20, was traipsing 65 00:06:30.920 --> 00:06:37.620 around Western Michigan lecturing on Tom Paine and atheism, among other topics. 66 00:06:37.620 --> 00:06:43.120 Her biographer, the late Paul Average, reports that for small fees she addressed the local 67 00:06:43.120 --> 00:06:48.520 and the National Freethought Circuit in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo and other Michigan towns. 68 00:06:48.520 --> 00:06:54.860 He notes that being a former pupil in a convent, she was a particularly effective speaker, 69 00:06:54.860 --> 00:07:00.680 as she could talk from first-hand experience, like the runaway slaves who addressed abolitionist 70 00:07:00.680 --> 00:07:03.720 gatherings before the Civil War. 71 00:07:03.720 --> 00:07:08.900 Volterine's speaking engagements led to further speaking engagements, and to opportunities 72 00:07:08.900 --> 00:07:11.720 to write for other publications. 73 00:07:11.720 --> 00:07:16.960 According to libertarian psychologist Sharon Presley, who co-edited a recent anthology 74 00:07:16.960 --> 00:07:23.920 of Volterine's writings, these other publications included The Freethinkers Magazine, Freethought, 75 00:07:23.920 --> 00:07:30.220 and The Truthseeker. And as her reputation grew, Presley writes, her lectures, including 76 00:07:30.220 --> 00:07:36.500 frequent tours for the American Secular Union, a nationwide freethought organization, took 77 00:07:36.500 --> 00:07:40.660 her to many Midwestern and Eastern states. 78 00:07:40.660 --> 00:07:47.900 By this time, it was late 1887, and Volterine was 21, a rising young star in the freethought 79 00:07:47.900 --> 00:07:48.900 movement. 80 00:07:48.900 --> 00:07:55.240 Today, those who know about freethought at all usually associate it with organized atheism, 81 00:07:55.240 --> 00:08:00.680 with Robert G. Ingersoll as the Madeleine Murray O'Hare of the 19th century. 82 00:08:00.680 --> 00:08:04.120 But in fact, there was much more to freethought than that. 83 00:08:04.120 --> 00:08:09.440 As another expert on Volterine's life and work, the late Eugenia de la Motte has pointed 84 00:08:09.440 --> 00:08:16.180 out, Freethought was an eclectic movement that included atheists, agnostics and deists, 85 00:08:16.180 --> 00:08:22.680 as well as religious thinkers, Unitarian, Transcendentalist, sometimes Quaker, who shared 86 00:08:22.680 --> 00:08:28.880 a scorn for religious dogma as a source of truth or authority, a rejection of biblical 87 00:08:28.880 --> 00:08:35.260 miracles and the divinity of Jesus, an aggressive activist commitment to separation of church 88 00:08:35.260 --> 00:08:47.260 and an insistence that human progress depends on the exercise of each individual's reason with regard even to subjects held most sacred. 89 00:08:47.260 --> 00:08:55.260 There were many free-thought periodicals and institutions in 19th century America that specialized in only one of these issues. 90 00:08:55.260 --> 00:09:01.260 De La Motte notes, for example, that the American Secular Union, which employed 91 00:09:01.260 --> 00:09:08.260 Volterine de Clare as a lecturer early in her career, placed its main focus on separation of church and state. 92 00:09:08.260 --> 00:09:14.260 Volterine's personal definition of free thought was direct and to the point. 93 00:09:14.260 --> 00:09:22.260 Free thought, she wrote, was the right to believe as the evidence coming in contact with the mind forces it to believe. 94 00:09:22.260 --> 00:09:30.260 This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon any subject which might come up for discussion. 95 00:09:30.260 --> 00:09:38.260 Delamotte comments that among the many subjects that came up routinely in late 19th century free-thinking circles 96 00:09:38.260 --> 00:09:49.260 were marriage, sexuality, birth control, women's rights, race relations, labor relations, and the relation of the individual to the state. 97 00:09:49.260 --> 00:09:56.060 Little wonder, then, that, as Paul Average puts it, between the anarchist and freethought 98 00:09:56.060 --> 00:10:02.940 movements there was a close and long-standing affinity. Both shared a common anti-authoritarian 99 00:10:02.940 --> 00:10:09.700 viewpoint and a common tradition of secularist radicalism stretching back to Thomas Paine, 100 00:10:09.700 --> 00:10:16.340 who was, of course, well thought of by atheists and anarchists alike. Nearly all anarchists 101 00:10:16.340 --> 00:10:20.860 Anarchists were freethinkers, and many first came to anarchism through the Freethought 102 00:10:20.860 --> 00:10:27.040 Movement, in which they constituted a militant left wing within the local clubs, as well 103 00:10:27.040 --> 00:10:30.820 as the regional and national federations. 104 00:10:30.820 --> 00:10:36.820 By 1888, when she was 21 years old, Voltairine de Clare was ready to become one of those 105 00:10:36.820 --> 00:10:42.060 anarchists who had first come to anarchism through the Freethought Movement. 106 00:10:42.060 --> 00:10:47.980 The specific event which precipitated her involvement with anarchism as a cause was the Haymarket 107 00:10:47.980 --> 00:10:55.640 Affair of 1886 and 1887. As Average tells the story, the Haymarket Affair, one of the 108 00:10:55.640 --> 00:11:02.840 most famous incidents in the history of the anarchist movement, began on May 3, 1886, 109 00:11:02.840 --> 00:11:08.780 when the Chicago police fired into a crowd of strikers at the McCormick Reaper Works, 110 00:11:08.780 --> 00:11:11.260 Building and Wounding Several Men. 111 00:11:11.260 --> 00:11:16.860 The following evening the anarchists held a protest meeting near Haymarket Square. 112 00:11:16.860 --> 00:11:22.340 Toward the end of the meeting, which had proceeded without incident, rain began to fall and the 113 00:11:22.340 --> 00:11:24.660 crowd started to disperse. 114 00:11:24.660 --> 00:11:30.900 The last speaker, Samuel Fielden, was concluding his address when a contingent of police marched 115 00:11:30.900 --> 00:11:34.060 in and ordered the meeting to be closed. 116 00:11:34.060 --> 00:11:38.960 Johnson objected that the gathering was peaceful and that he was just finishing up. 117 00:11:38.960 --> 00:11:41.340 The police captain insisted. 118 00:11:41.340 --> 00:11:44.300 At that moment, a bomb was thrown. 119 00:11:44.300 --> 00:11:50.260 One policeman was killed and nearly 70 were injured, of whom six later died. 120 00:11:50.260 --> 00:11:56.940 The police opened fire on the crowd, killing at least four workers and wounding many more. 121 00:11:56.940 --> 00:12:01.580 Who threw the bomb, Average continues, has never been determined. 122 00:12:01.580 --> 00:12:08.100 What is certain, however, is that the eight men who were brought to trial were not responsible. 123 00:12:08.100 --> 00:12:12.580 Six of them, in fact, were not even present when the explosion occurred, and the other 124 00:12:12.580 --> 00:12:16.580 two were demonstrably innocent of throwing the bomb. 125 00:12:16.580 --> 00:12:22.060 Moreover, no evidence was produced to connect the defendants with the bomb-thrower. 126 00:12:22.060 --> 00:12:28.420 Yet all eight were found guilty, the verdict being the product of perjured testimony, a 127 00:12:58.420 --> 00:13:05.700 In 1893, after spending seven years behind bars, the three remaining Haymarket anarchists 128 00:13:05.700 --> 00:13:11.820 were officially granted a pardon by Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, who destroyed 129 00:13:11.820 --> 00:13:15.740 his own political career by issuing that pardon. 130 00:13:15.740 --> 00:13:21.700 Average reports that Altgeld, in his message explaining the pardon, criticized the judge 131 00:13:21.700 --> 00:13:27.980 for conducting the trial with malicious ferocity, and found that the evidence had not shown 132 00:13:27.980 --> 00:13:50.980 In effect, though Altgeld didn't put it in these words, the court convicted the men for espousing an idea, the idea that human life would be better without the state, an idea that was widely believed to have influenced whoever did throw that fateful bomb at the Chicago police. 133 00:13:50.980 --> 00:13:59.980 The four who were executed were put to death for having committed what George Orwell would call, many years later, a thought crime. 134 00:13:59.980 --> 00:14:11.980 The execution horrified Volterine de Clare, the more so because she herself, not yet converted to the anarchist cause at the time the original bombing took place, 135 00:14:11.980 --> 00:14:16.980 had called for just that fate to be imposed on the suspects in the case. 136 00:14:16.980 --> 00:14:26.980 At the time of the explosion, in May 1886, Average writes, she was 19 years old. She had not yet left her mother's house for the last time. 137 00:14:26.980 --> 00:14:35.980 Glimpsing the newspaper headlines, anarchists throw bomb in crowd in the hay market in Chicago, she joined the cry for vengeance. 138 00:14:35.980 --> 00:14:41.980 They ought to be hanged, she declared, words over which she agonized for the rest of her life. 139 00:14:41.980 --> 00:15:07.980 for that ignorant, outrageous, bloodthirsty sentence, I shall never forgive myself, she confessed, on the fourteenth anniversary of the executions, though I know the dead men would have forgiven me, though I know those who loved them forgive me, but my own voice, as it sounded that night, will sound so in my ears till I die, a bitter reproach and shame. 140 00:15:07.980 --> 00:15:17.580 She dedicated a poem to Governor Altgeld when he pardoned the last three Haymarket anarchists, and yet another after his death in 1902. 141 00:15:17.580 --> 00:15:29.340 She wrote a poem to Matthew M. Trumbull, a distinguished Chicago attorney who had defended the anarchists in two incisive pamphlets and appealed to the state for clemency. 142 00:15:29.340 --> 00:15:42.340 Nor was this all. Nearly every year, Average writes, she took part in memorial meetings to her comrades, delivering moving and deeply felt orations, the most powerful of her career. 143 00:15:42.340 --> 00:15:49.340 She moved to Chicago near the end of her life, died there, and was buried there, next to the Haymarket Martyrs. 144 00:15:49.340 --> 00:15:56.460 In a word, she did penance. She devoted the rest of her life to penance for what she regarded 145 00:15:56.460 --> 00:16:03.340 as her unforgivable act of prejudgment. Her penance was writing for periodicals, delivering 146 00:16:03.340 --> 00:16:08.940 orations and lectures, and otherwise working to propagate the doctrine the martyrs had 147 00:16:08.940 --> 00:16:14.660 espoused, the doctrine of society without the state. She seems to have been that type 148 00:16:14.660 --> 00:16:21.660 type of personality, the type of the penitent, the devotee, the true believer, the ascetic. 149 00:16:21.660 --> 00:16:26.600 So perhaps it was inevitable that she would choose a career as a penitent. 150 00:16:26.600 --> 00:16:29.380 It was, in any case, a practical choice. 151 00:16:29.380 --> 00:16:33.720 If there was anything other than writing and speaking that she could truly be said to know 152 00:16:33.720 --> 00:16:36.320 how to do, it was penance. 153 00:16:36.320 --> 00:16:39.540 She had learned that at Our Lady of Port Huron. 154 00:16:39.540 --> 00:16:45.100 As she herself put it in 1903 in her essay, The Making of an Anarchist, 155 00:16:45.100 --> 00:16:49.420 By early influences and education I should have been a nun, 156 00:16:49.420 --> 00:16:54.540 And spent my life glorifying authority in its most concentrated form, 157 00:16:54.540 --> 00:16:57.740 As some of my schoolmates are doing at this hour, 158 00:16:57.740 --> 00:17:02.620 Within the mission houses of the order of the holy names of Jesus and Mary. 159 00:17:02.620 --> 00:17:08.280 Crispin Sartwell, who co-edited an anthology of Volterine's writings a few years ago with 160 00:17:08.280 --> 00:17:14.540 with Sharon Pressley argues that, in fact, Volterine internalized the convent's modesty 161 00:17:14.540 --> 00:17:19.320 and asceticism, whatever her disagreements with its dogma. 162 00:17:19.320 --> 00:17:24.920 Most pictures of her in later life, he points out, show her in plain high-necked garb that 163 00:17:24.920 --> 00:17:31.520 could almost be a habit, and her life of extreme frugality and devotion to her calling mirrored 164 00:17:31.520 --> 00:17:34.120 that of the nuns who helped raise her. 165 00:17:34.120 --> 00:17:40.360 Liberty was often referred to by her acquaintances in religious terms as a priestess or as the 166 00:17:40.360 --> 00:17:43.280 bride of her cause. 167 00:17:43.280 --> 00:17:49.480 Whatever her personal motives might have been, however, this much can be said with confidence. 168 00:17:49.480 --> 00:17:55.760 Once Volterine joined the libertarian cause, she quickly became one of its best-known exponents. 169 00:17:55.760 --> 00:18:01.360 She had been a 14-year-old prisoner in a convent school when Benjamin R. Tucker launched his 170 00:18:01.360 --> 00:18:04.360 and the First Libertarian Movement. 171 00:18:04.360 --> 00:18:10.360 Within a decade, she was writing for Tucker and had become one of the luminaries of his movement. 172 00:18:10.360 --> 00:18:18.360 Eugenia de Lamotte reports that while most of Volterine's lectures were delivered in the eastern and midwestern United States, 173 00:18:18.360 --> 00:18:28.360 she lectured also in England, Scotland and Norway, sometimes to small audiences but often to hundreds, sometimes to over a thousand. 174 00:18:28.360 --> 00:18:39.660 According to Paul Average, one appearance she made before the Social Science Club of Philadelphia was attended by an audience of 1200 that gave her a magnificent reception. 175 00:18:39.660 --> 00:18:52.360 De Lamotte mentions one 1908 anarchist demonstration also in Philadelphia, at which Volterine addressed what a local newspaper reporter described as some 2000 workers. 176 00:18:52.360 --> 00:19:03.860 Average mentions a rally she addressed in London at which she herself estimated that 10,000 people packed together with upturned faces were in attendance. 177 00:19:03.860 --> 00:19:16.860 And he reports that when Volterine died in Chicago late in June of 1912 at the age of only 45, 2,000 mourners turned out to witness her interment. 178 00:19:16.860 --> 00:19:22.860 Volterine never wrote a book, but certain of her essays are really neglected classics. 179 00:19:22.860 --> 00:19:35.860 Her essay Anarchism and American Traditions, for example, appeared originally in 1908 and 1909 in the pages of Mother Earth, Emma Goldman's anarchist magazine. 180 00:19:35.860 --> 00:19:43.860 It is a true gem. I know of no better brief treatment of the issues around which it is so cunningly, artfully constructed. 181 00:19:43.860 --> 00:19:49.900 The ways in which anarchism is implicit in the writings of the American founders, the 182 00:19:49.900 --> 00:19:56.700 absurdity of public education as a safeguard or cornerstone of a free society, the problem 183 00:19:56.700 --> 00:20:03.020 of widespread indifference to liberty, it is eminently quotable, it rings with a stirring 184 00:20:03.020 --> 00:20:09.320 spirit of defiance, it is fiercely intelligent, whether incorporated into a course in civics 185 00:20:09.320 --> 00:20:15.540 or Political Science, or simply included with other readings in a survey of American history, 186 00:20:15.540 --> 00:20:20.180 this piece should be required reading for every American high school student. 187 00:20:20.180 --> 00:20:25.500 Of course the essay is not perfect. In its last few pages, for example, it contains a 188 00:20:25.500 --> 00:20:30.220 few dubious and, at best, ambiguous economic references. 189 00:20:30.220 --> 00:20:36.580 Volterine, like Tucker and many of his associates, was a mutualist. She also entertained some 190 00:20:36.580 --> 00:20:42.980 Some somewhat fanciful ideas about the supposed economic benefits of small settlements producing 191 00:20:42.980 --> 00:20:50.900 everything for themselves, but all libertarians of this period are a bit screwy in their economics. 192 00:20:50.900 --> 00:20:56.340 Austrianism had not yet been fully developed, much less spread to the English-speaking world, 193 00:20:56.340 --> 00:21:01.260 and Volterine showed that her heart was in the right place when she argued for an idea 194 00:21:01.260 --> 00:21:06.160 that had already come to be called anarchism without adjectives. 195 00:21:06.160 --> 00:21:12.660 She wrote in 1901, for example, that there are several economic schools among anarchists. 196 00:21:12.660 --> 00:21:18.760 There are anarchist individualists, anarchist mutualists, anarchist communists and anarchist 197 00:21:18.760 --> 00:21:20.180 socialists. 198 00:21:20.180 --> 00:21:25.500 In times past, these several schools have bitterly denounced each other and mutually 199 00:21:25.500 --> 00:21:29.720 refused to recognize each other as anarchists at all. 200 00:21:29.720 --> 00:21:35.580 A far more reasonable idea, she proposed, is that all these economic conceptions may 201 00:21:35.580 --> 00:21:41.540 may be experimented with, and there is nothing un-anarchistic about any of them until the 202 00:21:41.540 --> 00:21:48.900 element of compulsion enters and obliges unwilling persons to remain in a community whose economic 203 00:21:48.900 --> 00:21:52.060 arrangements they do not agree to. 204 00:21:52.060 --> 00:21:57.620 A larger problem with a piece like Anarchism and American Traditions is that it is not 205 00:21:57.620 --> 00:22:00.820 in any sense an original piece of work. 206 00:22:00.820 --> 00:22:05.660 expounds no ideas save those its author has learned from others. 207 00:22:05.660 --> 00:22:11.680 The plain fact is that, as Eugenia de Lamotte observes, Declair was not one of the great 208 00:22:11.680 --> 00:22:17.420 original theorists of anarchism at its most general level, although many of her lectures 209 00:22:17.420 --> 00:22:23.700 are brilliant and cogent syntheses of ideas drawn from her extensive reading of anarchist 210 00:22:23.700 --> 00:22:25.340 theory. 211 00:22:25.340 --> 00:22:30.700 As a libertarian, Volterine's strong suit was not original thought. It was distilling 212 00:22:30.700 --> 00:22:36.700 and packaging the original thought of others. She was, in Friedrich Hayek's sense of the 213 00:22:36.700 --> 00:22:43.300 word, an intellectual, that is, a professional second-hand dealer in ideas. Such figures 214 00:22:43.300 --> 00:22:49.940 rarely command much fame outside the compass of their own lifetimes. Journalists, teachers, 215 00:22:49.940 --> 00:22:58.700 ministers, lecturers, publicists, radiocommentators, Hayek ticked them off, the common types of intellectuals. 216 00:22:58.700 --> 00:23:04.020 How many of them enjoy any sort of renown beyond whatever they enjoy during the years 217 00:23:04.020 --> 00:23:07.540 when their own generation is in the ascendant? 218 00:23:07.540 --> 00:23:13.240 However great their skill with words, however great their skill at distilling and packaging, 219 00:23:13.240 --> 00:23:16.180 they are easily and soon forgotten. 220 00:23:16.180 --> 00:23:21.940 The fact that nearly a hundred years after her untimely death, Volterine de Clare should 221 00:23:21.940 --> 00:23:28.300 have a full-length biography devoted to her, though, alas, it is currently out of print, 222 00:23:28.300 --> 00:23:34.540 and at least three annotated collections of her work buying for readers' attention, suggests 223 00:23:34.540 --> 00:23:40.620 that she may have already achieved a degree of immortality never realized by most of her 224 00:23:40.620 --> 00:23:42.820 fellow intellectuals. 225 00:23:42.820 --> 00:23:49.820 This is Jeff Rigenbach.