Blog - Page 111 of 286 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Heart of Angiolillo” (1898)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

Some women are born to love stories as the sparks fly upward. You see it every time they glance at you, and you feel it every time they lay a finger on your sleeve. There was a party the other night, and a four-year old baby who couldn’t sleep for the noise crept down into the parlor half frightened to death and transfixed with wonderment at the crude performances of an obtuse visitor who was shouting out the woes of Othello. One kindly little woman took the baby in her arms and said: “What would they do to you, if […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “A Rocket of Iron” (1902)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

It was one of those misty October nightfalls of the north, when the white fog creeps up from the river, and winds itself like a corpse-sheet around the black, ant-like mass of human insignificance, a cold menace from Nature to Man, till the foreboding of that irresistible fatality which will one day lay us all beneath the ice-death sits upon your breast, and stifles you, till you start up desperately crying, “Let me out, let me out!” For an hour I had been staring through the window at that chill steam, thickening and blurring out the lines that zig-zagged through […]

Voltairine De Cleyre, “Sunday Schools and Social Intercourse Among Liberals” (1890)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

For the Boston Investigator. SUNDAY SCHOOLS AND SOCIAL INTERCOURSE AMONG LIBERALS Mr. Editor:—Among the many wants of the Free Thought movement is a much wider social intercourse than exists at present, a much more extensive acquaintance with the literature and plans for work of other similar organizations. This became singularly evident to me on the evening of the 12th of October last, when I lectured before the German Freethinking Society at Philadelphia. So far, the American and German movements have been “things apart.”—True, an attempt was made at Milwaukee to unite them after a fashion; but it failed, because there […]

J. Wm. Lloyd, “Prayer of the Governmentalist” (1886)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

For Lucifer Prayer of the Governmentalist. Our Government which is in Washington—hallowed be thy name! May thy Kingdom become, and thy will be done, in America even as the Czar’s is in Russia! Give us this day a chance at some big fat office, and remit to us our taxes according to tho amount we have loaned thee on thy bond, with interest, and grant to us favors in consideration of our efficiency at election times! Lead us not into Liberty, and deliver us from Anarchy; for behold, we are altogether too stupid and greedy to comprehend or endure them! […]

Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Old Shoemaker” (1896), with note and response

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Old Shoemaker He had lived a long time there, in the house at the end of the alley, and no one had ever known that he was a great man. He was lean and palsied, and had a crooked back; his beard was grey and ragged, and his eyebrows came too far forward; there were seams and flaps in the empty, yellow old skin, and he gasped horribly when he breathed, taking hold of the lintel of the door to steady himself when he stepped out on the broken bricks of the alley. He lived with a frightful old […]

“Voltairine De Cleyre at Greensburg” (1893)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

For the Boston Investigator. VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE AT GREENSBURG. Mr. Editor:—In the little city of Greensburg, some thirty miles east of Pittsburgh, there are a few brave, strong souls who are making war on God and his adjutants with a zeal which only those who have a principle at heart can do. About a month ago your subscriber, being invited to deliver a lecture under the auspices of their union, found herself shaking hands with the ungodly trinity of officers one April night, after a long day’s ride though the perpetual wonder of the Alleghany mountains. Very sad, gray-brown, sorrowful […]

“Justice and Jehovah” (1888)

August 11, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

“JUSTICE AND JEHOVAH.” The Address of Miss Voltairine De Cleyre Before the Cleveland Secular Union Miss Voltairine De Cleyre of Grand Rapids addressed the Secular union in the Memorial hall last evening on the subject of “Justice and Jehovah.” The central idea in her address is expressed in the quotation from Tennyson’s Locksley Hall: “Cursed be the social lies that warp us from the living truth.” The lecturer essayed to show by a series of word pictures—told metaphorically as visions—conditions of society which cannot be properly vindicated by the idea of a just or good God. Her first description was […]

Voltairine De Cleyre, “The Woman’s National Liberty Union” (1890)

August 10, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

THE WOMAN’S NATIONAL LIBERAL UNION Mr. Editor:—Hereafter let it not be said that the women of American are behind their brothers in the work of freeing the country from superstition’s shackles. The most radical organization in the United States, so far as the Church is concerned, was born in Washington D. C., the 24th of last month. And that organization is founded by women, officered by women, and will do its principal worth through women. It is the first and only national English-speaking body in these State of American which has the courage of its convictions, and openly declared its […]

Joseph A. Labadie, “The Meaning of Anarchy” (1896)

August 10, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Meaning of Anarchy. This is a good time, it seems, to enter a protest. You have heard, no doubt, the expression of being killed by kindness. Well, I am not exactly being killed by kindness, but am being put in a false light by friends and foes alike. J. T. Small of Provincetown, Mass., says I am “one of the ablest exponents” of Anarchism; Professor Raymond, of Detroit, calls me “one of the most intelligent philosophical Anarchists in the country”; Rev. E. J. Riggs, of Provincetown, asserts that I am “the high-cockalorum of philosophical Anarchism”; Dr. Maryson declares that […]

J. Wm. Lloyd, “A Free Socialist” (1895)

August 10, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

My statement that henceforth I was no Anarchist, but a Free Socialist, was intended to refer to my public profession. Having stated that my view of Anarchism was that it was the doctrine “that the invasion of one human being by another was in the highest degree wrong, foolish, dangerous, and inexpedient—that this was Anarchism and this only,” and having, in conclusion, stated that my renunciation of the name Anarchist did “not mean any change of views,” it, of course, follows that, although I reject the name Anarchist, I, in my heart, still regard myself as one.

[…]