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.
Blazing Star Library
William B. Greene, “Plutocracy” (1849)
Here’s one of William B. Greene’s letters to The Worcester Palladium which was not incorporated into either Equality or the 1850 Mutual Banking. Thanks again to Brady Campbell for the research assist on these. A number of my questions from two years ago remain, but I’m back at the work of transcribing and collating the mutual bank writings, so perhaps we can clear most of them up soon. [2010 note] Wm. B. Greene in “The Worcester Palladium” For the Palladium. Plutocracy. The term Plutocracy occurs in the Democratic State Address: it is derived from the words Plutus (the god of […]
Anarchism
An early mutual banking proposal
I’m wrapping up my first exploration of The Spirit of the Age (a little more rapidly than I had hoped, thanks to an Interlibrary Loan mix-up), and am already planning a road trip to scan more of this really important mutualist paper. My lengthy side-trip, from the William B. Greene research through the work of Joshua King Ingalls and ultimately to The Spirit of the Age, has paid an unexpected dividend (if, in this context, I can safely speak about the paying of dividends)—a discussion of Mutual Banking in the 1850 volume which casts Greene’s work in a somewhat different […]
Anarchism
Plans and Prospects
As many of you know, I’ll be relocating from Ohio to Oregon sometime in the late spring/early summer of 2008. Teaching work has dried up out here, so it seems like time to move. I’ll be close to my parents and to a number of friends from Ohio who moved out there. Even if I stay poor, there will be mountains in the background, which is a big consolation for a guy who’s been living on an ancient lake bed for eighteen years. All of this has, of course, meant a little shuffling of priorities. I have access to resources […]