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Socialism in Massachusetts, the Palladium version

February 3, 2007 Shawn P. Wilbur

You can look at this wiki page for a comparison of the Worcester Palladium and Equality versions of William B. Greene’s essay, “Socialism in Massachusetts,” both from late 1849. MediaWiki’s ability to collate versions should be a very useful tool for demonstrating the development or aguments in archived texts. For those unfamiliar with the publishing history involved, you can start with my comments on the 1870 Mutual Banking.

William B. Greene’s 1870 “Mutual Banking”

July 6, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

Since this post was written, most of Greene’s works on mutual credit have become available in various digital archives. Here are some links: Equality (1849) Mutual Banking (1850) The Radical Deficiency Of The Existing Circulating Medium, And The Advantages Of A Mutual Currency (1857) Mutual Banking, Showing The Radical Deficiencies Of The Existing Circulating Medium, And The Advantages Of A Free Currency (1870) I’ve been spending more time scanning and proofing than posting lately. The most important result of that is that William Batchelder Greene’s 1870 Mutual Banking, Showing The Radical Deficiencies Of The Existing Circulating Medium, And The Advantages […]

1850: The Hotbed of Mutual Banking Agitation

April 11, 2006 Shawn P. Wilbur

In the years 1849 and 1850, William B. Greene published Equality and Mutual Banking, describing his Christian Mutualism and setting out the details of the real estate based mutual bank. He was at that time, the minister of the Unitarian church in Brookfield, Massachusetts. In 1850 and 1851, he lead a rural agitation-by-petition, by means of which the General Court of Massachusetts was repeatly asked to legalize this updated form of land bank. We know from copies of the petitions in the 1857 The Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium that the petitioners included “the Towns of Brookfield, Warren, […]

Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, 1857

December 5, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

William B. Greene’s 1857 Radical Deficiency of the Existing Circulating Medium, and the Advantages of a Mutual Currency is now online in the Libertarian Labyrinth. This is the text issued during the Panic of 1857—at a time when the Greenes were actually living in France, but visiting Boston from time to time—combining elements from the 1849 Equality and the 1850 Mutual Banking, both of which have recently been added to the online version of the Blazing Star Library. I’ve also posted a fairly rough beginning to the promised Combined Edition of Mutual Banking and Equality. So far, this incorporates all […]

William B. Greene’s 1850 “Mutual Banking”

December 1, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

By 1850, the year William Batchelder Greene turned 31 and retired from the ministry, he had written, in one form or another, nearly all of his major works. He lived until 1878, and was active until about 1875, and he certainly did not stop writing, revising or organizing in support of his ideas. In 1853, in the course of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, questions of women’s suffrage and voter qualification would assume a new importance for him—and this line of thought would not see its full expression until after his Civil War service, in the essay “The Sovereignty of the […]

William B. Greene, Equality (1849)

November 26, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve finally got Equality, the first of Greene’s mutual banking books online. This is the 1849 work largely based on those still-elusive Worcester Palladium articles. Here’s the index: EQUALITY, NO. 1. The Banking System The Usury Laws Equal Laws and Equality Before The Laws The Currency The Currency—Its Evils—And Their Remedy EQUALITY, NO. II. To the Philosophers and Politicians. Solidarity The Formula of Labor Communism—Capitalism—Socialism Socialism in Massachusetts Liberty Readers of any of the later editions of Mutual Banking should recognize the 2nd, 4th and 5th sections of No. I, and readers of this blog will recognize the 3rd section […]

Taking Proudhon (and controversy) out of “Mutual Banking”

November 14, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur

A funny thing happened on the way to the modern edition of William B. Greene’s Mutual Banking. We know that with Mutual Banking, as was so often the case with Greene’s work, the editorial refinement process over the years consisted largely of whittling away at his early works, Equality (1849) and Mutual Banking (1850), cutting down towards the kernel of occasionally sprawling explorations. The editors of Proudhon’s Solution to the Social Problem, who gave us the modern edition of Mutual Banking, only continued that trend. The result is a bit peculiar. While modern critics have at times taken pains to […]