This essay concerns the life and times of Benjamin Ricketson Tucker, who was born near Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in 1854 and died in Monaco, Europe, in 1939. Benjamin R. Tucker edited the longest-lived newspaper in the English language advocating Individualist Anarchism, Liberty, an occupation that lead him into political association with many of the leading figures of American political and social reform.
A consistent anarchist, Tucker also became the advocate of the new poetry and drama, symbolized by his defense of Walt Witman and by his sparking the work of Eugene O'Neill, among others. He opposed Henry George's brand of anarchism. He defended Alexander Berkman, with reservations, and, from self-imposed exile, wrote the governor of Massachusetts to commute the sentencing of Sacco and Vanzetti to death, even though he was a life-long advocate of peaceful change unless force was first used against anarchists, whatever their brand.
He opened the columns of his three journals, The Radical Review, The Transatlantic, and Liberty to all shades of opinion, whether he agreed or disagreed with the authors. And, above all, he fought for individual anarchism, the right of voluntary associations as against state compulsion.
He represents an era in American history, a product of the social implications of New England Transcendentalism and New York millenarianism, even though he never used either term. It is to evidence these links, and to bring him into the mainstream of American political and intellectual history that this essay is being written.
For too long Tucker has been relegated to isolated footnotes and fragmentary treatment, mostly erroneous, in studies of American radicalism. But this is not a task of rehabilitation in and of itself; on several issues, the author disagrees with the position Tucker took. But Tucker was consistent, and, if a "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," to quote from one of Tucker's favorites, Emerson, it can be said that there were times (notably, his letter to Schwab and Goldman when they requested his cooperation in pleading for clemency for Alexander Berkman) when Tucker was "foolishly consistent."
But such was the nature of the man. Of the utmost integrity, he refused to bend his principles for any reason, and here he displays a characteristic reminiscent of the religious reformers of previous generations. There was but one road to real, or actual, terrestrial salvation: that road was individualist anarchism as a daily life procedure, and any compromise with the principals of that program was to compromise with the terrestrial devils of capitalism, and the three monopolies of rent, interest, and profit.
Tucker's great enemy was the state, which granted these monopolies. He printed a chapter of the original edition of Herbert Spencer's Social Statistics, deleted from later editions, attacking the state, issuing that chapter as a separate pamphlet. He encouraged any opposition, preferably peaceful, against the state. He was, in his own words, "an unterrified Jeffersonian Democrat," and if that government governed best which governs least, then the logical conclusion was to have no government at all.
To that principle, Tucker never wavered. And his roots are deep in American life, as this essay will try to prove.