page_title: Anarchism in the United States
section_title: Early anarchism
hierarchical_section_title: Anarchism in the United States / History / Early anarchism
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of William Batchelder Greene. Low resolution - Sufficient resolution for illustration, but considerably lower resolution than original.
context_page_description: Anarchism in the United States began in the mid-19th century and started to grow in influence as it entered the American labor movements, growing an anarcho-communist current as well as gaining notoriety for violent propaganda of the deed and campaigning for diverse social reforms in the early 20th century.
  In the post-World War II era, anarchism regained influence through new developments such as anarcho-pacifism, the American New Left and the counterculture of the 1960s.
  In contemporary times, anarchism in the United States influenced and became influenced and renewed by developments both inside and outside the worldwide anarchist movement such as platformism, insurrectionary anarchism, the new social movements and the alter-globalization movements.
context_section_description: For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette Schuster, American individualist anarchism "stresses the isolation of the individual—his right to his own tools, his mind, his body, and to the products of his labor. To the artist who embraces this philosophy it is 'aesthetic' anarchism, to the reformer, ethical anarchism, to the independent mechanic, economic anarchism. The former is concerned with philosophy, the latter with practical demonstration. The economic anarchist is concerned with constructing a society on the basis of anarchism. Economically he sees no harm whatever in the private possession of what the individual produces by his own labor, but only so much and no more. The aesthetic and ethical type found expression in the transcendentalism, humanitarianism, and romanticism of the first part of the nineteenth century, the economic type in the pioneer life of the West during the same period, but more favorably after the Civil War".
  It is for this reason that it has been suggested that in order to understand American individualist anarchism one must take into account "the social context of their ideas, namely the transformation of America from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist society ... the non-capitalist nature of the early U.S. can be seen from the early dominance of self-employment (artisan and peasant production). At the beginning of the 19th century, around 80% of the working (non-slave) male population were self-employed. The great majority of Americans during this time were farmers working their own land, primarily for their own needs" and so "individualist anarchism is clearly a form of artisanal socialism ... while communist anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are forms of industrial (or proletarian) socialism".
  Historian Wendy McElroy reports that American individualist anarchism received an important influence of three European thinkers: "One of the most important of these influences was the French political philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon whose words "Liberty is not the Daughter But the Mother of Order" appeared as a motto on Liberty's masthead" (influential individualist anarchist publication of Benjamin Tucker). "Another major foreign influence was the german philosopher Max Stirner". "The third foreign thinker with great impact was the British philosopher Herbert Spencer". Other influences to consider include William Godwin's "anarchism (which) exerted an ideological influence on some of this, but more so the socialism of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.
  The emergence and growth of anarchism in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s has a close parallel in the simultaneous emergence and growth of abolitionism. No one needed anarchy more than a slave.
  After success of his British venture, Owen himself established in 1825 a cooperative community within the United States at New Harmony, Indiana. One member of this commune was Josiah Warren (1798–1874), considered to be the first individualist anarchist. After New Harmony failed Warren shifted his ideological loyalties from socialism to anarchism (which was no great leap, given that Owen's socialism had been predicated on Godwin's anarchism)". Warren is widely regarded as the first American anarchist and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, was the first anarchist periodical published, an enterprise for which he built his own printing press, cast his own type and made his own printing plates. Warren was a follower of Owen and joined Owen's community at New Harmony. Warren termed the phrase "Cost the limit of price", with "cost" here referring not to monetary price paid but the labor one exerted to produce an item. Therefore, "[h]e proposed a system to pay people with certificates indicating how many hours of work they did. They could exchange the notes at local time stores for goods that took the same amount of time to produce". He put his theories to the test by establishing an experimental "labor for labor store" called the Cincinnati Time Store, where trade was facilitated by notes backed by a promise to
caption: William B. Greene
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