LBJ Presidential Library director Mark Updegrove, chiding Selma for avoiding the legislative-centric approach of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, protests that LBJ has been vouched for by George W. Bush. Bill Moyers calls it “the worst kind of creative license” to hold LBJ responsible for the FBI’s surveillance of King — surveillance initially authorized by another liberal icon, Robert F. Kennedy. A more appropriate reaction to the FBI’s activities portrayed in the film (and to the extensive reportage of its misdeeds in the recent documentary 1971) would be indignation that the bureau still exists.

Meanwhile, Selma‘s defenders downplay its (and their) criticism of LBJ. We’ve come a long way since Disney animator Ward Kimball’s anti-Vietnam War protest film Escalation skewered LBJ with phallic symbolism.

But the real issue goes beyond personal loyalty to LBJ, or even a general view of politicians as well-meaning by those fond of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s apocryphal “now make me do it.” Time’s David Kaiser lets the cat out of the bag, fretting that Selma “contributes to a popular but mistaken view of how progress in the United States can occur. The civil rights movement won its greatest triumphs in the 1950s and 1960s by working through the system as well as in the streets.” Forbes‘ Mark Hughes notes that “ultimately the real cause of the backlash against Selma [is that] it suggests the black community saved itself.”

Debating the extent to which the civil rights movement prodded politics ignores its direct-action achievements, with on-the-ground victories for desegregation preceding legislation, sometimes by years. Indeed, social critic Paul Goodman went so far as to assess the civil rights movement as “almost classically decentralist and anarchist.”

Moreover, LBJ’s domestic program was elitist and of a piece with Vietnam. King attested that the War on Poverty’s top-down programs “have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Examination bears out Murray Rothbard’s conclusion: “The cruelest myth fostered by the liberals is that the Great Society functions as a great boon and benefit to the poor; in reality, when we cut through the frothy appearances to the cold reality underneath, the poor are the major victims.”

LBJ’s quip that “the only power I’ve got is nuclear” wasn’t entirely hyperbolic. Heeding Voltairine de Cleyre’s summation of the history of the anti-slavery movement — “as to what the politicians did, it is one long record of ‘how-not-to-do-it'” — such force is also the only power we won’t need.

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“The Dominant Idea” first appeared as a serialized article in Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman’s influential anarchist magazine, Mother Earth, with the first instalment in May 1910. Soon after, the Mother Earth Publishing Association printed a booklet edition of the article, which they sold through their catalogue from 1910 onward.

“Regnant ideas, everywhere! Did you ever see a dead vine bloom? I have seen it. Last summer I trained some morn­ing-glory vines up over a second story balcony; and every day they blew and curled in the wind, their white, purple-dashed faces wink­ing at the sun, radiant with climbing life. Then all at once some mis­chance hap­pened, some cut worm or some mis­chiev­ous child tore one vine off below. The sappy stem wilt­ed and began to wither; in a day it was dead, — all but the top which still clung longingly to its sup­port, with bright head lifted. But the next night there was a storm, a heavy, driving storm, with beat­ing rain and blind­ing lightning. I rose to watch the flashes, and lo! the won­der of the world! In the black­ness of the mid-night, in the fury of wind and rain, the dead vine had flower­ed. Five white, moon-faced blossoms blew gaily round the skel­e­ton vine, shining back triumphant at the red lightning. I gazed at them in dumb wonder. Dear, dead vine, whose will had been so strong to bloom, that in the hour of its sudden cut-off from the feed­ing earth, it sent the last sap to its blos­soms; and, not waiting for the morn­ing, brought them forth in storm and flash, as white night- glories, which should have been the child­ren of the sun. Over death and decay the Dominant Idea smiled: the vine was in the world to bloom, to bear white trumpet blossoms dash­ed with purple; and it held its will beyond death.

“Ithink this unqualified determinism of the material is a great, lamentable error in our modern progressive move­ment; the absolute sway of Matter is quite as mischievous an error as the unrelated nature of Mind; in its direct action upon personal con­duct, it has the more ill effect of the two. What we need is a true appraise­ment of the power and rôle of the Idea. Against the accept­ed form­u­l­a of modern Materialism, ‘Men are what circum­stances make them,’ I set the opposing declaration, ‘Circumstances are what men make them’; and I contend that both these things are true, up to the point where the combating powers are equalized, or one is overthrown….”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) was a popular Anarchist and feminist writer, speaker and activist. Her contemporary and friend Emma Goldman called her “the most gifted and brilliant anarch­ist woman America ever produced.” She published articles in Liberty, Twentieth Century, Free Society and Mother Earth, and worked closely with libertarian com­mun­ists, market anarch­ists, and mutualists within the Phila­delphia social an­arch­ist move­ment, but refused to commit herself to economic blueprints, adopting a pluralistic view of economic arrangements in any future free society.

An Anarchist-Communist is a person who is a man first and a Communist afterward. He generally gets into a great many irreconcilable situations at once, believes that property and competition must die yet admits he has no authority to kill them, contends for equality and in the same breath denies its possibility, hates charity and yet wishes to make society one vast Sheltering Arms, and, in short, very generally rides two horses going in opposite directions at the same time. He is not usually amenable to logic; but he has a heart forty or fifty times too large for nineteenth century environments, and in my opinion is worth just that many cold logicians who examine society as a naturalist does a beetle, and impale it on their syllogisms in the same manner as the Emperor Domitian impaled flies on a bodkin for his own amusement.

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COM.: “Well, I admit that much. Certainly the employé cannot compete with his employer.”

INDV.: “Then you admit that there is not free competition in the present state of society. In other words, you admit that the laboring class are not free to compete with the holders of capital, because they have not, and cannot get, the means of production. Now for your ‘what of that?’ It follows that if they had access to land and opportunity to capitalize the product of their labor they would either employ themselves, or, if employed by others, their wages, or remuneration, would rise to the full product of their toil, since no one would work for another for less than he could obtain by working for himself.”

COM.: “But your object is identical with that of Communism! Why all this to convince me that the means of production must be taken from the hands of the few and given to all? Communists believe that; it is precisely what we are fighting for.”

INDV.: “You misunderstand me if you think we wish to take from or give to any one. We have no scheme for regulating distribution. We substitute nothing, make no plans. We trust to the unfailing balance of supply and demand. We say that with equal opportunity to produce, the division of product will necessarily approach equitable distribution, but we have no method of ‘enacting’ such equalization.”

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Hearing that all this was going down just blocks away from where I live, I joined up with some of my local activist friends at a union hall to help out the victims any way I could. When we arrived at the station, we were met with a long line of exclusively adult female immigrants, some holding the hands of small children. Clothes, water, and the use of a cell phone to call family members were the three big items in demand. ICE drops them off at the station without a change of clothes or a bus ticket, so they’ve got to find a way to get clean, hydrated, and procure a ride all in the space of a few hours. The amazing volunteers who helped out that day managed to provide them with all of the above and more, and even though most of the immigrants were limited to washing off in the Greyhound bathroom and forgoing a meal on the bus ride back, they couldn’t have been more appreciative and kind.

This was my first time volunteering with a radical community, and if I wasn’t already convinced of the potential of Direct Action, this experience did it for me.

The very phrase “direct action”- being a deliberate term associated with anti-authoritarian movements – conjures up scenes of aggression and violence against state institutions: Black rows of masked protesters wielding molotovs, improvised raids on animal testing facilities, even communist attempts to “disrupt the flow of capital” are all valid instances of direct action. But to limit the phrase to only its most dramatic manifestations is a mistake. Voltairine de Cleyre said of Direct Action circa 1912:

 Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them, was a direct actionist. All co-operative experiments are essentially direct action.

This all-encompassing conception of Direct Action is the most meaningful, because it acknowledges how peaceful, voluntary cooperation toward a given goal can best achieve desired outcomes.

To examine the efficacy of this direct approach, consider the steps one must take to achieve something within the confines of the political system. For instance, you could always vote for the most promising presidential candidate. Going this route, if you’re very lucky, your vote has a “1 in 10 million chance of determining the national election outcome.” Even if you’re one of the lucky few, your candidate will most likely break his more appealing promises, whether he vowed to free political prisoners or you’re reading his lips about “no new taxes.” Aside from the purely theatrical ritual of voting, the very systems underlying politics cause blockage. Bloated bureaucracy and red tape backs up the process and absorbs any genuine attempt at meaningful change. Party members, even at the local level, must “play the game” and play up to special interests if they want to survive the cutthroat world of corruption and nepotism. If there ever was any genuine intent to begin with, it is quickly swept under the rug to make way for “moving the needle forward” and other such nihilistic rallying cries of Whiggish progress for progress’s sake.

The spirit of Direct Action is inherently anti-authoritarian as it bypasses the arbitrary thresholds of negotiation and concession that come packaged with politics. There’s no need to beg politicians for a drink when you can, as David Graeber puts it, “dig the well yourself”.

But behind the tactical and ethical consistency of Direct Action in community volunteering, there’s the invaluable bonus of personally connecting with those in need. The sheer sincerity of helping others is a humbling experience, and for me, the Greyhound station was a sharp moment of clarity when my anarchist principles were more than words bound to the page by logic and rhetoric: They took shape in a way that brought vastly different individuals together for a crucial cause. I went hoping that I could be a part of that cause – I never knew it would become such a big part of me.

For all its brazen anti-statism, Hess’s “red-white-and-blue anarchy” fits like a glove with a cover that proclaims “Happy Birthday, America!” while placing popular Playmate Cyndi Wood, beaming with a joy utterly alien to the patriotism of what Matthew Yglesias calls “grim-faced folks and bourgeois respectability and military jets flying in tight formation”, in a tasteful restyling of the venerable imagery of a flag-carrying Lady Liberty clad in a robe somewhat more revealing than the traditional versions.

Indeed, the issue’s editorial comments place Hess’s American anarchism within the general questioning-authority attitude in the country at a time where, even after the cooling of the tumult of The Sixties, everything still seemed up for grabs. Hess’s explication of “why we’d be better off with no government at all” isn’t treated as all that much farther out than the dissident contributions on the state of the States from better-remembered Gil “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” Scott-Heron and Ron “Born on the Fourth of July” Kovic. As unlikely as it seems in retrospect, given that Hess is now half-remembered at best even in movements he sparked from small-scale technology to libertarianism, it really could seem plausible at the time that he might represent the overall course of the United States.

Befitting Playboy‘s reputation, Sam Merrill’s interview is freewheeling and wide-ranging, yet always clear and readable. Particularly notable is its precision about the sequence of events in Hess’s unruly life, frustratingly elusive in Hess’s own autobiographical writings. The pre-Q&A introductory blurb alone is more concrete than Hess’s entire first autobiography Dear America.

While judging Hess’s worldview to be “somewhat bizarre,” and occasionally breaking into sheer incredulity at some of Hess’s most startling views (such as when he denies that presidents are essentially different from kings or opposes child-labor laws as “just a typical example of snobby liberal elitism”), Merrill never gawks or patronizes, but carefully and sympathetically probes the underlying worldview behind Hess’s apparently wild changes in political affiliations, lifestyle and milieu that have usually led to the bewilderment summed up by Brian Doherty:

Hess transformed himself from a suit-and-tie anti-communist GOP platform-scribbler and Goldwater speechwriter into a Castro manqué Black Panther cheerleader and Institute for Policy Studies inmate. It’s not surprising that scholars unwilling to dig into philosophical roots might see libertarianism as some inconsistent, ad hoc cobbling together of leftist and rightist notions.

Indeed, Merrill carefully notes Hess’s consistent synthesis of “equal pinches of right-wing self-reliance and rugged individualism, left-wing ecology and conservation and liberal (although he shudders visibly at the word) concern for the welfare of the disadvantaged.” As the culture war lines have become ever more rigidly solidified, this counterexample is ever more welcome.  Nowhere is it more urgent than in environmentalism, with deeply entrenched denial by conservatives and equally entrenched reliance on technocratic solutions by liberals.

While it’s juicy fun to read Hess’s lampoons of a variety of widely-looked-up-to public figures — from FDR (“What makes you think I have anything against Roosevelt? Roosevelt was wonderful — if you like fascists”) to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (“Most people would call him a left-wing historian.” “He is neither left-wing nor a historian.”); from placing Huey Long among totalitarian “right-wingers” to casually stating that Texas oil billionaire “[H.L.] Hunt was a Stalinist;” or simply listing “Humphrey, Ford, Jackson, Rockefeller, Kennedy, Reagan or any of the other state socialists of the American right” — they aren’t mere provocations.

Instead, they come from a consistent positive worldview. Hess is confident that almost all political power can be devolved to neighborhoods (though this enthusiasm doesn’t prevent some cutting criticism of his time in the suburbs). The few remaining larger-scale necessities would be taken care of by agreements similar to the federations of classical anarchism, sans their tendency towards bureaucracy suspiciously like representative democracy in all but name.  He completely rejects the textbook arguments that representation of any sort is necessary at all, and suggests that management could be handled by chimpanzees and pigeons.

Compared to Hess’s other works, his viewpoint is closest to the previous year’s Dear America and the documentary Karl Hess: Toward Liberty in capturing him at his leftmost. As Merrill notes, “you’ve really moved as far left as you can go.”

This Hess prefers “anarchist” to “libertarian”, and his position on capitalism is: “Theoretical, laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t strike me as immoral — just unnecessary. I’d prefer it to many other ways of running things, but it’s wasteful and causes people to be overly concerned with numbers”.

And Hess pitilessly dissects the empty sophistry of the vulgar libertarian propaganda he used to write for the wealthy: “Mostly, I wrote speeches praising ‘the great system that produces all our material well-being.’ It was easy. I simply leaped from the fact of the productivity to a generalized justification of everything associated with it.”

In discussing his personal experiences with powerful conservative leaders from William F. Buckley Jr. to Gerald Ford, Hess is candid but charitable, and never bitter. He still holds out his original hope that Barry Goldwater would become a New Leftist, though one of Goldwater’s suggestions, that the Soviet Union would eventually become freer than the United States, is too radical for even Hess’s credence.

While skewering conservatives’ phoniness in their lip service to what are still Hess’s ideals of self-reliance and local control, their bloodthirstiness and their devotion to national security, militarism and law and order, Hess would still agree with Matt Stone’s “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals”:

“The only reason I’m knocking conservatives is because they’re worth knocking. Liberals scarcely are. Conservatives make a number of grievous errors, but they also make a number of correct analyses. It is not known to me that liberals make any correct analyses.” Liberals’ unlimited elitism and grasping for centralization of power infuriates Hess even more than conservatives, and puts them “slightly farther along the road to dictatorship.”

Surprisingly, Hess retains sympathy for the Norman Thomas socialism of his pre-conservative youth, seeing value in its social programs before the New Deal’s elites removed them from popular control.

To many, Hess’s relative sympathy for Israel may be even more unexpected. He praises its (and Sweden’s!) parliamentary structure for its absence of an executive branch, and thus a personality cult around its leader.  He baffledly replies “I neither endorse nor understand it” when asked about the left’s favoring the Arab states, which rather than being socialist “are feudal … actually pre-capitalist!” While acknowledging that its current location in the Middle East makes it “a roadblock to world peace for generations to come” (though “I think you can make a fairly good case for its having happened in self-defense”), for all his antistatism he believes that “a Jewish state, located in a politically hospitable region [such as “Texas or Orange County. Those areas aren’t being used for much now”], would almost certainly become a great benefit to all mankind.”

Hess comes across as far as possible from the Bill Ayers-style hard leftists who came to be identified with the revolutionary ends of the radical left, disclaiming any attraction to leadership even when pressed if it would be “even for a brief, transitory period”. Indeed Playboy calls him a “humane revolutionary”. While Hess puzzles why conservatives don’t admire the Black Panthers and amends NRA slogans to be more antigovernment, he conspicuously lacks enthusiasm for putting counterrevolutionaries up against the wall: “the freer a society gets, the less need there is to shoot people”. His sheer personal modesty and lack of self-aggrandizement is telling, lacking any impulse towards puffery or dropping the many names he easily could. As he sums up his anarchism: “What did you expect, a lot of rules?”

Hess evinces a commendable skepticism of the counterculture’s widespread and often-disastrous attraction to dubiousness and charlatanism, lacking the trendy enthusiasm for drugs (“pleasurable, but they don’t expand your mind. They make you useless”) or Mao (“an elitist, a bureaucrat”). If anything he takes this a bit too far; he’s unduly dismissive of Timothy Leary as “a clown” (certainly a huckster, but an often-prescient one) and it’s jarring that an anarchist outlaw would have no sympathy for Bonnie and Clyde.

Ours is an era where the left has, in diametric opposition to Hess and Voltairine de Cleyre, become steadily more hostile to American culture — with their occasional attempts to invoke it coming off as insincere — while becoming wedded ever more intimately with its government, and anarchism seems to have difficulty remembering its anti-statism.

When the label of “libertarian” has become so diluted that a recent Playboy interviewee could in the same breath claim it while insisting he’s “not for” marijuana legalization, we need some public figures with Hess’s down-to-earth, plainspoken, yet unbending radicalism.

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The essay reprinted in this booklet was originally published as “Anarchism,” in the October 13, 1901 edition of the Anarchist movement newspaper FREE SOCIETY (ed. Abe Isaak). I’ve retitled it because that’s a boring title for an essay about Anarchism in an Anarchist newspaper, or in an Anarchist pamphlet series.

But the content is anything but: A startling, provocative, and moving statement of de Cleyre’s emerging re-conception of anarchy herself as “an Anarchist, simply, without economic label attached,” — and of anarchy as a pluralistic process of social experimentation and self-exploration, — the essay has been retitled with two of the most striking phrases appearing in the text, speaking of the freedom “to try. . .” and of the anarchic, un-ruly self as a bottomless depth of “all strange sensations.”

“I have now presented the rough skeleton of four different economic schemes entertained by Anarch­ists. Re­mem­ber that the point of agreement in all is: no com­puls­ion. Those who favor one method have no intention of forcing it upon those who favor another, so long as equal tolerance is exercised toward them­selves. . . . For myself, I believe that all these and many more could be advantageously tried in different localities; I would see the habits of the people express them­selves in a free choice in every com­mun­ity; and I am sure that distinct envi­on­ments would call out distinct adaptations. My ideal would be a con­di­t­ion in which all natural re­sources would be forever free to all, and the work­er individually able to produce for him­self sufficient for all his vital needs, if he so chose, so that he need not govern his working or not work­ing by the times and sea­s­ons of his fellows. I think that time may come; but it will only be through the dev­el­op­ment of the modes of pro­duc­t­ion and the taste of the people. Meanwhile we all cry with one voice for the free­dom to try. . . .”

“Are these all the aims of Anarchism? They are just the beginning. They outline what is demanded for the material producer. Immeasurably deeper, immeasurably higher, dips and soars the soul which has come out of its case­ment of custom and cow­ardice, and dared to claim its Self. Ah, once to stand unflinchingly on the brink of that dark gulf of passions and desires, once at last to send a bold, straight-driven gaze down into the volcanic Me, once, and in that once forever, to throw off the command to cover and flee from the knowledge of that abyss, – . . . to realize that one is. . . a bottomless, bottomless depth of all strange sensations . . . quakings and shud­der­ings of love that drives to madness and will not be controlled, hunger­ings and meanings and sobbing that smite upon the inner ear . . . To look down into that, to know the blackness, the midnight, the dead ages in oneself, to feel the jungle and the beast within, . . . — to see, to know, to feel the uttermost, – and then to look at one’s fellow, sitting across from one in the street-car, . . . and to wonder what lies beneath that commonplace exterior — to picture the cavern in him which somewhere far below has a narrow gallery running into your own. . . . Letting oneself go free, go free beyond the bounds of what fear and custom call the ‘possible,’ — this too Anarchism may mean to you, if you dare to apply it so.”

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866-1912) was a popular Anarchist and feminist writer, speaker and activist. Her contemporary and friend Emma Goldman called her “the most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced.” She published articles in Liberty, Twentieth Century, Free Society and Mother Earth, and worked closely with libertarian communists, market anarchists, and mutualists within the Philadelphia social anarchist movement, but refused to commit herself to economic blueprints, adopting a pluralistic view of economic arrangements in any future free society.

The revolution is the sudden and unified consciousness of these traditions, their loud assertion, the blow dealt by their indomitable will against the counter force of tyranny, which has never entirely recovered from the blow, but which from then till now has gone on remolding and regrappling the instruments of governmental power, that the Revolution sought to shape and hold as defenses of liberty.

To the average American of today, the Revolution means the series of battles fought by the patriot army with the armies of England. The millions of school children who attend our public schools are taught to draw maps of the siege of Boston and the siege of Yorktown, to know the general plan of the several campaigns, to quote the number of prisoners of war surrendered with Burgoyne; they are required to remember the date when Washington crossed the Delaware on the ice; they are told to “Remember Paoli,” to repeat “Molly Stark’s a widow,” to call General Wayne “Mad Anthony Wayne,” and to execrate Benedict Arnold; they know that the Declaration of Independence was signed on the Fourth of July, 1776, and the Treaty of Paris in 1783; and then they think they have learned the Revolution – blessed be George Washington! They have no idea why it should have been called a “revolution” instead of the “English War,” or any similar title: it’s the name of it, that’s all. And name-worship, both in child and man, has acquired such mastery of them, that the name “American Revolution” is held sacred, though it means to them nothing more than successful force, while the name “Revolution” applied to a further possibility, is a spectre detested and abhorred. In neither case have they any idea of the content of the word, save that of armed force. That has already happened, and long happened, which Jefferson foresaw when he wrote:

“The spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may become persecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated that the time for fixing every essential right, on a legal basis, is while our rulers are honest, ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will be heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion.”

To the men of that time, who voiced the spirit of that time, the battles that they fought were the least of the Revolution; they were the incidents of the hour, the things they met and faced as part of the game they were playing; but the stake they had in view, before, during, and after the war, the real Revolution, was a change in political institutions which should make of government not a thing apart, a superior power to stand over the people with a whip, but a serviceable agent, responsible, economical, and trustworthy (but never so much trusted as not to be continually watched), for the transaction of such business as was the common concern and to set the limits of the common concern at the line of where one man’s liberty would encroach upon another’s.

They thus took their starting point for deriving a minimum of government upon the same sociological ground that the modern Anarchist derives the no-government theory; viz., that equal liberty is the political ideal. The difference lies in the belief, on the one hand, that the closest approximation to equal liberty might be best secured by the rule of the majority in those matters involving united action of any kind (which rule of the majority they thought it possible to secure by a few simple arrangements for election), and, on the other hand, the belief that majority rule is both impossible and undesirable; that any government, no matter what its forms, will be manipulated by a very small minority, as the development of the States and United States governments has strikingly proved; that candidates will loudly profess allegiance to platforms before elections, which as officials in power they will openly disregard, to do as they please; and that even if the majority will could be imposed, it would also be subversive of equal liberty, which may be best secured by leaving to the voluntary association of those interested in the management of matters of common concern, without coercion of the uninterested or the opposed.

Among the fundamental likeness between the Revolutionary Republicans and the Anarchists is the recognition that the little must precede the great; that the local must be the basis of the general; that there can be a free federation only when there are free communities to federate; that the spirit of the latter is carried into the councils of the former, and a local tyranny may thus become an instrument for general enslavement. Convinced of the supreme importance of ridding the municipalities of the institutions of tyranny, the most strenuous advocates of independence, instead of spending their efforts mainly in the general Congress, devoted themselves to their home localities, endeavoring to work out of the minds of their neighbors and fellow-colonists the institutions of entailed property, of a State-Church, of a class-divided people, even the institution of African slavery itself. Though largely unsuccessful, it is to the measure of success they did achieve that we are indebted for such liberties as we do retain, and not to the general government. They tried to inculcate local initiative and independent action. The author of the Declaration of Independence, who in the fall of ’76 declined a re-election to Congress in order to return to Virginia and do his work in his own local assembly, in arranging there for public education which he justly considered a matter of “common concern,” said his advocacy of public schools was not with any “view to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better the concerns to which it is equal”; and in endeavoring to make clear the restrictions of the Constitution upon the functions of the general government, he likewise said:

“Let the general government be reduced to foreign concerns only, and let our affairs be disentangled from those of all other nations, except as to commerce, which the merchants will manage for themselves, and the general government may be reduced to a very simple organization, and a very inexpensive one; a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants.”

This then was the American tradition, that private enterprise manages better all that to which it IS equal. Anarchism declares that private enterprise, whether individual or cooperative, is equal to all the undertakings of society. And it quotes the particular two instances, Education and Commerce, which the governments of the States and of the United States have undertaken to manage and regulate, as the very two which in operation have done more to destroy American freedom and equality, to warp and distort American tradition, to make of government a mighty engine of tyranny, than any other cause, save the unforeseen developments of Manufacture.

It was the intention of the Revolutionists to establish a system of common education, which should make the teaching of history one of its principal branches; not with the intent of burdening the memories of our youth with the dates of battles or the speeches of generals, nor to make the Boston Tea Party Indians the one sacrosanct mob in all history, to be revered but never on any account to be imitated, but with the intent that every American should know to what conditions the masses of people had been brought by the operation of certain institutions, by what means they had wrung out their liberties, and how those liberties had again and again been filched from them by the use of governmental force, fraud, and privilege. Not to breed security, laudation, complacent indolence, passive acquiescence in the acts of a government protected by the label “home-made,” but to beget a wakeful jealousy, a never-ending watchfulness of rulers, a determination to squelch every attempt of those entrusted with power to encroach upon the sphere of individual action – this was the prime motive of the revolutionists in endeavoring to provide for common education.

“Confidence,” said the revolutionists who adopted the Kentucky Resolutions, “is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy, not in confidence; it is jealousy, not confidence, which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no further, our confidence may go… In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

These resolutions were especially applied to the passage of the Alien laws by the monarchist party during John Adams’ administration, and were an indignant call from the State of Kentucky to repudiate the right of the general government to assume undelegated powers, for said they, to accept these laws would be “to be bound by laws made, not with our consent, but by others against our consent – that is, to surrender the form of government we have chosen, and to live under one deriving its powers from its own will, and not from our authority.” Resolutions identical in spirit were also passed by Virginia, the following month; in those days the States still considered themselves supreme, the general government subordinate.

To inculcate this proud spirit of the supremacy of the people over their governors was to be the purpose of public education! Pick up today any common school history, and see how much of this spirit you will find therein. On the contrary, from cover to cover you will find nothing but the cheapest sort of patriotism, the inculcation of the most unquestioning acquiescence in the deeds of government, a lullaby of rest, security, confidence – the doctrine that the Law can do no wrong, a Te Deum in praise of the continuous encroachments of the powers of the general government upon the reserved rights of the States, shameless falsification of all acts of rebellion, to put the government in the right and the rebels in the wrong, pyrotechnic glorifications of union, power, and force, and a complete ignoring of the essential liberties to maintain which was the purpose of the revolutionists. The anti-Anarchist law of post-McKinley passage, a much worse law than the Alien and Sedition acts which roused the wrath of Kentucky and Virginia to the point of threatened rebellion, is exalted as a wise provision of our All-Seeing Father in Washington.

Such is the spirit of government-provided schools. Ask any child what he knows about Shays’ rebellion, and he will answer, “Oh, some of the farmers couldn’t pay their taxes, and Shays led a rebellion against the court-house at Worcester, so they could burn up the deeds; and when Washington heard of it he sent over an army quick and taught ’em a good lesson” – “And what was the result of it?” “The result? Why – why – the result was – Oh yes, I remember – the result was they saw the need of a strong federal government to collect the taxes and pay the debts.” Ask if he knows what was said on the other side of the story, ask if he knows that the men who had given their goods and their health and their strength for the freeing of the country now found themselves cast into prison for debt, sick, disabled, and poor, facing a new tyranny for the old; that their demand was that the land should become the free communal possession of those who wished to work it, not subject to tribute, and the child will answer “No.” Ask him if he ever read Jefferson’s letter to Madison about it, in which he says:

“Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable. 1. Without government, as among our Indians. 2. Under government wherein the will of every one has a just influence; as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our States in a great one. 3. Under government of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics. To have an idea of the curse of existence in these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem not clear in my mind that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it … It has its evils too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. … But even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to public affairs. I hold that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.”

Or to another correspondent:

“God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion! …What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that the people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take up arms … The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Ask any school child if he was ever taught that the author of the Declaration of Independence, one of the great founders of the common school, said these things, and he will look at you with open mouth and unbelieving eyes. Ask him if he ever heard that the man [Thomas Paine] who sounded the bugle note in the darkest hour of the Crisis, who roused the courage of the soldiers when Washington saw only mutiny and despair ahead, ask him if he knows that this man also wrote, “Government at best is a necessary evil, at worst an intolerable one,” and if he is a little better informed than the average he will answer, “Oh well, he was an infidel!” Catechize him about the merits of the Constitution which he has learned to repeat like a poll-parrot, and you will find his chief conception is not of the powers withheld from Congress, but of the powers granted.

Such are the fruits of government schools. We, the Anarchists, point to them and say: If the believers in liberty wish the principles of liberty taught, let them never entrust that instruction to any government; for the nature of government is to become a thing apart, an institution existing for its own sake, preying upon the people, and teaching whatever will tend to keep it secure in its seat. As the fathers said of the governments of Europe, so say we of this government also after a century and a quarter of independence: “The blood of the people has become its inheritance, and those who fatten on it will not relinquish it easily.”

Public education, having to do with the intellect and spirit of a people, is probably the most subtle and far-reaching engine for molding the course of a nation; but commerce, dealing as it does with material things and producing immediate effects, was the force that bore down soonest upon the paper barriers of constitutional restriction, and shaped the government to its requirements. Here, indeed, we arrive at the point where we, looking over the hundred and twenty five years of independence, can see that the simple government conceived by the revolutionary republicans was a foredoomed failure. It was so because of: 1) the essence of government itself; 2) the essence of human nature; 3) the essence of Commerce and Manufacture.

Of the essence of government, I have already said, it is a thing apart, developing its own interests at the expense of what opposes it; all attempts to make it anything else fail. In this Anarchists agree with the traditional enemies of the Revolution, the monarchists, federalists, strong government believers, the Roosevelts of today, the Jays, Marshalls, and Hamiltons of then – that Hamilton, who, as Secretary of the Treasury, devised a financial system of which we are the unlucky heritors, and whose objects were twofold: To puzzle the people and make public finance obscure to those that paid for it; to serve as a machine for corrupting the legislatures; “for he avowed the opinion that man could be governed by two motives only, force or interest”; force being then out of the question, he laid hold of interest, the greed of the legislators, to set going an association of persons having an entirely separate welfare from the welfare of their electors, bound together by mutual corruption and mutual desire for plunder. The Anarchist agrees that Hamilton was logical, and understood the core of government; the difference is, that while strong govermnentalists believe this is necessary and desirable, we choose the opposite conclusion, No Government Whatsoever.

As to the essence of human nature, what our national experience has made plain is this, that to remain in a continually exalted moral condition is not human nature. That has happened which was prophesied: we have gone down hill from the Revolution until now; we are absorbed in “mere money-getting.” The desire for material ease long ago vanquished the spirit of ’76. What was that spirit? The spirit that animated the people of Virginia, of the Carolinas, of Massachusetts, of New York, when they refused to import goods from England; when they preferred (and stood by it) to wear coarse, homespun cloth, to drink the brew of their own growths, to fit their appetites to the home supply, rather than submit to the taxation of the imperial ministry. Even within the lifetime of the revolutionists, the spirit decayed. The love of material ease has been, in the mass of men and permanently speaking, always greater than the love of liberty. Nine hundred and ninety nine women out of a thousand are more interested in the cut of a dress than in the independence of their sex; nine hundred and ninety nine men out of a thousand are more interested in drinking a glass of beer than in questioning the tax that is laid on it; how many children are not willing to trade the liberty to play for the promise of a new cap or a new dress? That it is which begets the complicated mechanism of society; that it is which, by multiplying the concerns of government, multiplies the strength of government and the corresponding weakness of the people; this it is which begets indifference to public concern, thus making the corruption of government easy.

As to the essence of Commerce and Manufacture, it is this: to establish bonds between every corner of the earth’s surface and every other corner, to multiply the needs of mankind, and the desire for material possession and enjoyment.

The American tradition was the isolation of the States as far as possible. Said they: We have won our liberties by hard sacrifice and struggle unto death. We wish now to be let alone and to let others alone, that our principles may have time for trial; that we may become accustomed to the exercise of our rights; that we may be kept free from the contaminating influence of European gauds, pageants, distinctions. So richly did they esteem the absence of these that they could in all fervor write: “We shall see multiplied instances of Europeans coming to America, but no man living will ever seen an instance of an American removing to settle in Europe, and continuing there.” Alas! In less than a hundred years the highest aim of a “Daughter of the Revolution” was, and is, to buy a castle, a title, and rotten lord, with the money wrung from American servitude! And the commercial interests of America are seeking a world empire!

In the earlier days of the revolt and subsequent independence, it appeared that the “manifest destiny” of America was to be an agricultural people, exchanging food stuffs and raw materials for manufactured articles. And in those days it was written: “We shall be virtuous as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case as long as there remain vacant lands in any part of America. When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there.” Which we are doing, because of the inevitable development of Commerce and Manufacture, and the concomitant development of strong government. And the parallel prophecy is likewise fulfilled: “If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption, indifferent and incapable of a wholesome care over so wide a spread of surface.” There is not upon the face of the earth today a government so utterly and shamelessly corrupt as that of the United States of America. There are others more cruel, more tyrannical, more devastating; there is none so utterly venal.

And yet even in the very days of the prophets, even with their own consent, the first concession to this later tyranny was made. It was made when the Constitution was made; and the Constitution was made chiefly because of the demands of Commerce. Thus it was at the outset a merchant’s machine, which the other interests of the country, the land and labor interests, even then foreboded would destroy their liberties. In vain their jealousy of its central power made enact the first twelve amendments. In vain they endeavored to set bounds over which the federal power dare not trench. In vain they enacted into general law the freedom of speech, of the press, of assemblage and petition. All of these things we see ridden roughshod upon every day, and have so seen with more or less intermission since the beginning of the nineteenth century. At this day, every police lieutenant considers himself, and rightly so, as more powerful than the General Law of the Union; and that one who told Robert Hunter that he held in his fist something stronger than the Constitution, was perfectly correct. The right of assemblage is an American tradition which has gone out of fashion; the police club is now the mode. And it is so in virtue of the people’s indifference to liberty, and the steady progress of constitutional interpretation towards the substance of imperial government.

It is an American tradition that a standing army is a standing menace to liberty; in Jefferson’s presidency the army was reduced to 3,000 men. It is American tradition that we keep out of the affairs of other nations. It is American practice that we meddle with the affairs of everybody else from the West to the East Indies, from Russia to Japan; and to do it we have a standing army of 83,251 men.

It is American tradition that the financial affairs of a nation should be transacted on the same principles of simple honesty that an individual conducts his own business; viz., that debt is a bad thing, and a man’s first surplus earning should be applied to his debts; that offices and office holders should be few. It is American practice that the general government should always have millions of debt, even if a panic or a war has to be forced to prevent its being paid off; and as to the application of its income office holders come first. And within the last administration it is reported that 99,000 offices have been created at an annual expense of 1663,000,000. Shades of Jefferson! “How are vacancies to be obtained? Those by deaths are few; by resignation none.” Roosevelt cuts the knot by making 99,000 new ones! And few will die – and none resign. They will beget sons and daughters, and Taft will have to create 99,000 more! Verily a simple and a serviceable thing is our general government.

It is American tradition that the Judiciary shall act as a check upon the impetuosity of Legislatures, should these attempt to pass the bounds of constitutional limitation. It is American practice that the Judiciary justifies every law which trenches on the liberties of the people and nullifies every act of the Legislature by which the people seek to regain some measure of their freedom. Again, in the words of Jefferson: “The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary, which they may twist and shape in any form they please.” Truly, if the men who fought the good fight for the triumph of simple, honest, free life in that day, were now to look upon the scene of their labors, they would cry out together with him who said:

“I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifices of themselves by the generation of ’76 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I shall not live to see it.”

And now, what has Anarchism to say to all this, this bankruptcy of republicanism, this modern empire that has grown up on the ruins of our early freedom? We say this, that the sin our fathers sinned was that they did not trust liberty wholly. They thought it possible to compromise between liberty and government, believing the latter to be “a necessary evil,” and the moment the compromise was made, the whole misbegotten monster of our present tyranny began to grow. Instruments which are set up to safeguard rights become the very whip with which the free are struck.

Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license”; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man’s determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations. On the other hand, so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men.

The problem then becomes, Is it possible to stir men from their indifference? We have said that the spirit of liberty was nurtured by colonial life; that the elements of colonial life were the desire for sectarian independence, and the jealous watchfulness incident thereto; the isolation of pioneer communities which threw each individual strongly on his own resources, and thus developed all-around men, yet at the same time made very strong such social bonds as did exist; and, lastly, the comparative simplicity of small communities.

All this has disappeared. As to sectarianism, it is only by dint of an occasional idiotic persecution that a sect becomes interesting; in the absence of this, outlandish sects play the fool’s role, are anything but heroic, and have little to do with either the name or the substance of liberty. The old colonial religious parties have gradually become the “pillars of society,” their animosities have died out, their offensive peculiarities have been effaced, they are as like one another as beans in a pod, they build churches – and sleep in them.

As to our communities, they are hopelessly and helplessly interdependent, as we ourselves are, save that continuously diminishing proportion engaged in all around farming; and even these are slaves to mortgages. For our cities, probably there is not one that is provisioned to last a week, and certainly there is none which would not be bankrupt with despair at the proposition that it produce its own food. In response to this condition and its correlative political tyranny, Anarchism affirms the economy of self-sustenance, the disintegration of the great communities, the use of the earth.

I am not ready to say that I see clearly that this will take place; but I see clearly that this must take place if ever again men are to be free. I am so well satisfied that the mass of mankind prefer material possessions to liberty, that I have no hope that they will ever, by means of intellectual or moral stirrings merely, throw off the yoke of oppression fastened on them by the present economic system, to institute free societies. My only hope is in the blind development of the economic system and political oppression itself. The great characteristic looming factor in this gigantic power is Manufacture. The tendency of each nation is to become more and more a manufacturing one, an exporter of fabrics, not an importer. If this tendency follows its own logic, it must eventually circle round to each community producing for itself. What then will become of the surplus product when the manufacturer shall have no foreign market? Why, then mankind must face the dilemma of sitting down and dying in the midst of it, or confiscating the goods.

Indeed, we are partially facing this problem even now; and-so far we are sitting down and dying. I opine, however, that men will not do it forever, and when once by an act of general expropriation they have overcome the reverence and fear of property, and their awe of government, they may waken to the consciousness that things are to be used, and therefore men are greater than things. This may rouse the spirit of liberty.

If, on the other hand, the tendency of invention to simplify, enabling the advantages of machinery to be combined with smaller aggregations of workers, shall also follow its own logic, the great manufacturing plants will break up, population will go after the fragments, and there will be seen not indeed the hard, self-sustaining, isolated pioneer communities of early America, but thousands of small communities stretching along the lines of transportation, each producing very largely for its own needs, able to rely upon itself, and therefore able to be independent. For the same rule holds good for societies as for individuals–those may be free who are able to make their own living.

In regard to the breaking up of that vilest creation of tyranny, the standing army and navy, it is clear that so long as men desire to fight, they will have armed force in one form or another. Our fathers thought they had guarded against a standing army by providing for the voluntary militia. In our day we have lived to see this militia declared part of the regular military force of the United States, and subject to the same demands as the regulars. Within another generation we shall probably see its members in the regular pay of the general government. Since any embodiment of the fighting spirit, any military organization, inevitably follows the same line of centralization, the logic of Anarchism is that the least objectionable form of armed force is that which springs up voluntarily, like the minute men of Massachusetts, and disbands as soon as the occasion which called it into existence is past: that the really desirable thing is that all men – not Americans only – should be at peace; and that to reach this, all peaceful persons should withdraw their support from the army, and require that all who make war shall do so at their own cost and risk; that neither pay nor pensions are to be provided for those who choose to make man-killing a trade.

As to the American tradition of non-meddling, Anarchism asks that it be carried down to the individual himself. It demands no jealous barrier of isolation; it knows that such isolation is undesirable and impossible; but it teaches that by all men’s strictly minding their own business, a fluid society, freely adapting itself to mutual needs, wherein all the world shall belong to all men, as much as each has need or desire, will result.

And when Modern Revolution has thus been carried to the heart of the whole world – if it ever shall be, as I hope it will – then may we hope to see a resurrection of that proud spirit of our fathers which put the simple dignity of Man above the gauds of wealth and class, and held that to, be an American was greater than to be a king.

In that day there shall be neither kings nor Americans – only Men; over the whole earth, MEN.