In 1928, while he was in self-imposed exile in Monaco, Benjamin Ricketson Tucker began an autobiography. Never one to enjoy writing a "book," Tucker's autobiographic papers, written at the age of 74, really consist of eighty-nine handwritten pages of comments on his family history, his education at M.I.T., sketches of some men who influenced him in his youth, and in retrospect, some of the books that stimulated him towards his anarchist beliefs.1
He did not complete this work, his final reference being to his entrance into the Greeley campaign on the Liberal Republican ticket of 1872. This was the same year in which he met Josiah Warren and William B. Greene at a meeting of the New England Labor Reform League in Boston, where he was attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was under the influence of Warren and Greene that he became an anarchist, and he always acknowledged the role of these two men (sometimes adding James K. Ingalls) as having directed his political thoughts.
Prefacing this autobiographic sketch with a motto from Benjamin F. Butler, "I fear no man, and love but a few," Tucker begins by quoting a letter to George Bernard Shaw, written on August 10, 1926, in which he (Tucker) writes to Shaw on the occasion of a German production of one of Shaw's plays, which had elicited a note of thanks from Shaw to the producer. Tucker had observed that he was among the first to introduce Shaw to a wider audience, and thus could be considered "next . . . to Shaw himself." Shaw responded to this letter with the statement, "Well, my dear Tucker, so you are. I shall be the first to acknowledge it, if I am challenged." Tucker then goes on to say, "Whatever may be the thought of this verdict thus pronounced by the foremost living Anarchist, it, at any rate, encourages me to yield to the pressing solicitations that have reached me from widely-scattered friends and tell the story of my life."2
In his sketch, Tucker indicates that he is writing this autobiography to "battle agains liars. . . . I am going to tell my story, because I am afraid that if I do not, someone else will. And I am becoming more and more convinced that most story-tellers are either mendacious or negligent—many of them both." "My life," he continues, "though far from unhappy, is packed with incident, and has been one long flouting of the moral law. At the age of eighteen, having read the utilitarian thinkers, my moral conceptions became tenuous, to say the least; at the age of thirty, on becoming familiar with the doctrine of Stirner, they vanished quietly."
Emphasizing that he was not an "artist" and, therefore, could not make the story of his life "picturesque," he was going to write the story as "an old and weary philosopher," whose story "must needs be garbed in drab, befitting the Quaker blood from which I sprang. Drab or dazzling, the costume covers a personality above the moral law and mentally emancipated; in short, an Egoistic Anarchist." Born in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, new New Bedford, on April 17, 1854, Tucker was the son of Abner Ricketson Tucker, who was the owner of some half-dozen whaling ships there and the outfitter of many more. Abner Tucker's father, Benjamin Ricketson Tucker, a Quaker as was his son, had a general store in Russell Mills, one of the names for Dartmouth proper. At the urging of his grandfather, plus a $100 gift and a silver cup, the grandson received the name Benjamin Ricketson Tucker.
In his autobiographical sketch, Benjamin refers to his paternal grandfather, who advertised in the New Bedford Mercury on March 9, 1827, to the effect that he had a "complete assortment of British, French, Indian, and domestic goods, all of which he offers for sale as cheap, or cheaper, for cash or approved credit, as can be purchased elsewhere." This grandfather was a Quaker, but our Benjamin states that he was "far from the general conception of the Quaker in his appearance and manner of life." He seems (sic) to have been rather gay in his dress, and to have been very fond of good living, the last of which qualities he handed down to his son and grandson."
He attended the Friends Academy in New Bedford, and the Congregational Sunday School. In an article that appeared in the New Bedford Sunday Standard on May 22, 1927, Mr. Tetlow, who had been the principal of the Friend's Academy in New Bedford, is reported as having remembered Tucker as a pupil on both weekdays and Sundays. He credits Tucker with being able to read English fluently at the age of two (a statement made by Tucker in his autobiographical manuscript). Tucker recalls that at the age of four he was to call the attention of two Episcopalian daughters of his father's half sister to a misquotation of the Bible in the Episcopalian prayer book. By the age of twelve, Tetlow recalls, Tucker gave up attending morning worship services and came under the influence of William J. Potter, the Unitarian Minister of New Bedford (his family had affiliated with this church) who was also President of the Friendly Religious Association of America.3
1
This auto-biographic sketch
(herinafter referred to as
Autobiography)
is written on foolscap paper, and entitled:
of
Benjamin R. Tucker
Disclosed by Himself
In the Principality of Monaco
at the Age of 74
2 Autobiography, p. 3. Shaw's letter is dated 17 Aug. 1926.
3 Of his attendance at the Unitarian Church, Tucker was to observe, ". . . my years at the Unitarian Church in New Bedford constituted the primary source for the education for my high calling—the Apostolate of Liberty" (Autobiography, pp. 36–37). There is an interesting postscript to this affiliation; in 1927, Reverend E. Stanton Hodgin of the Unitarian Church of New Bedford announced a series of lectures on "Damaged Isms," in which Tucker wrote him from Monaco protesting the exclusion of anarchism in the proposed series, adding, "Indeed I cherish the hope that you look upon Anarchism as the only Ism, that, despite all the previously insane assaults upon it, remains undamaged, and therefore is in no need of your assistance, and I bold to say that it will so continue, with or without your 'Good Word.'" In the exchange of letters which followed (duly published in the New Bedford Standard) Hodgins replied that he excluded Anarchism only because he had to choose only seven Isms, having only seven Sundays for the series. Tucker responded with the charge that, if so, Hodgins should not have included Communism, anarchism's "diametrical opposite." What piqued Tucker most was his memory of the invitation extended him forty years before by the then Unitarian minister, Dr. Paul Frothingham, to deliver his to-become famous lecture, State Socialism and Anarchism, generally considered, Tucker continues, "my most important single contribution to sociological literature." (Autobiography, pp. 37–38.) Also, New Bedford Evening Standard, June 12, June 14, 1927.