In 1873, William Batchelder Greene was asked by Ezra Heywood to explain Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s ideas on property. Greene sent along translations of the first three, and last three pages of What is Property? and a short, fascinating account of Proudhon and his ideas, based on Greene’s acquaintance with Proudhon during his years in Paris, roughly 1853-1861. It is clear from the account that Greene was most familiar with Proudhon’s earlier works. Some of Greene’s explanation is not consistent with the works from the 1860s, and some of it is consistent, as when Greene likens property to Satan, but in ways […]
This chapter from the Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic and Financial Fragments (1875), originally appeared in The Word. Greene’s correspondent is apparently Jesse Henry Jones (1836-1904), a frequent contributor to The Word and a number of other reform-oriented or religious magazines, and author of several books. He prompted debates in a couple of the Oneida-related periodicals, and composed a song in support of the 8-hour movement. (I’ll try to find some time to treat Jones separately, and dig up the immediate context for this exchange.) Greene is in his combatative mode here, happy to damn “communism,” specifically in the sense of community […]
This letter from Ezra H. Heywood is the first fruits of several days spent researching in Eugene, OR and Berkeley, CA, over the last couple of months. When I discovered that both André Léo and Jenny d’Héricourt had corresponded with the American women’s rights papers The Revolution and The Agitator, and that both papers had published partial translations of André Léo’s La femme et les mœurs, it became obvious that I needed to track those papers down. I was already familiar with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury’s paper, The Revolution, which contained contributions by Ezra Heywood, Josiah Warren, C. […]
