There are quite a number of things I didn’t find in my searches through the Boston Investigator this week, but one of the things I did find was “Capital and Labor: Socialism in Massachusetts,” by OMEGA—one of the essays by William Batchelder Greene that was incorporated into his Equality (1849), reprinted from the Worcester Palladium. For some time, I have been wrestling with the question whether or not I could justify research travel to track down these articles, since they, and the book they were turned into, all appear to have been written in a matter of months, late in 1849, and it has been uncertain how much difference there was likely to be between the forms. The question is at least partially answered now—there are real and interesting differences.
Corvus Distribution
Corvine Call #1 Origins and Blazing Stars
“Waiting for a moment until another shellbark dropped, a blue-jay perched upon a bare twig and sang after its fashion. It was a short series of discordant notes; collectively, a harsh, rattling, corvine call, and yet it blended well with the gnarly branches and shaggy bark. Coarse, but honest to the core. There was nothing for mere appearance’s sake, such as gluts you in modern assemblages of men. The blue-jay is a bird murderer, but he does not care a whit who knows it. There is no stabbing in the back about him, and now that the spared nestlings of […]
anarchist mutualism
William B. Greene’s “A Priori Autobiography”
[ezcol_1third] Contr’un Revisited: [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] 1849 was a busy year for William Batchelder Greene. In that year, he published at least six articles, under the pseudonym “Omega,” in The Worcester Palladium, then collected some of that material and some new work in Equality, the first of his major mutual banking works. He published the first pamphlet edition of his Transcendentalism, which had previously appeared as two articles in The American Review, and he also published Remarks on the Science of History, followed by an A priori Autobiography, a work integrating his apparently wide reading in European philosophies of history with […]
Blazing Star Library
William B. Greene, “Equality—No. 6. Cain and Abel” (1850)
Like several of the other articles that he contributed to The Worcester Palladium, this early article by William Batchelder Greene contains some of his most direct expressions of anarchistic and socialistic ideas, but weaves them together with his rather esoteric readings of scripture. The result is both striking and perplexing. Equally perplexing is the question of just which essays we should consider to be the fourth and fifth entries in the “Equality” series. While the two installments of “Capital and Labor” were included in the book Equality, the themes here seem to be a continuation of the material covered in […]