William Batchelder Greene

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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project

November 26, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
In the course of doing some research on Bessie Greene, I ran across the excellent Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project. The archive contains a large number of Jewett’s texts, from Country of the Pointed Firs to much more obscure articles, as well as some works by Annie Adams Fields and Celia Thaxter. If you search down through the text of Celia Thaxter’s letters, you’ll find the following: To Annie Fields. Shoals, May 20, 1874. I am full of sadness and of sympathy over this terrible disaster. Hardly can I think of anything else, and those two dear people haunt my […]
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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 […]
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Greene, Whittier, Brownson

November 15, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
I’ve posted two new biographical tidbits in the Libertarian Labyrinth. The first is from Annie Fields Author’s and Friends (1896), a collection of reminiscences. It tells the story of “the Bachiler eyes:” Old New England people were quick to recognize “the Bachiler eyes,” not only in the Whittiers, but in Daniel Webster, Caleb Cushing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Bachiler Greene, a man less widely known than these distinguished compatriots. Mr. Greene was, however, a man of mark in his own time, a daring thinker, and one who was possessed of much brave originality, whose own deep thoughtfulness was always planting […]
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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 […]
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Lord Acton on William Batchelder Greene

November 9, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
I just read through Acton In America (Shepherdston: Patmos Press, 1979; S. W. Jackman, ed.). It’s a delightful, predictably opinionated read. It describes Lord Acton’s visit to the US in 1853, with entries covering New York, Boston and Emmitsburg, Maryland. Naturally, he met many of the prominent citizens of the cities. He seems to have liked Orestes Brownson as well as anyone he met. Richard Henry Dana took him to see the workings of the Massachusetts State Constitutional Convention, where he met William B. Greene. He apparently did not see Greene give the speech on the qualification of voters which […]
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“A Transcendentalist in Political Economy”

October 27, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
Reading through William B. Greene’s various essays on New England Transcendentalism, perhaps the most puzzling question is: “Why does he care? What’s the Big Deal?” Greene clearly looked up to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and just as clearly tried to make that respect clear, even as he ripped into transcendentalism. He was not intellectually slavish in his admirations. By 1845, when he published the first of the works on transcendentalism, Greene had already made at least one attempt to rectify what he saw as errors in Orestes Brownson’s formulation of the “doctrine of life” and its consequences. Later, his use of […]
Blazing Star Library

William B. Greene’s Articles on Transcendentalism

October 25, 2005 Shawn P. Wilbur
Bibliography: “Mr. Emerson and Transcendentalism.” American Whig Review (March 1845). “The Bhagvat Gheeta and the Doctrine of Immortality.” American Whig Review (September 1845). “Human Pantheism.” Spirit of the Age, I, 349. The first two essay were condensed into the 1849 pamphlet Transcendentalism, which was further condensed into “Human Pantheism,” and then revised into the 1871 Transcendentalism, which was reprinted in 1872 in The Blazing Star (probably from the same plates) with one additional, final paragraph added. A full bibliographic essay and content analysis is in preparation. MR. EMERSON AND TRANSCENDENTALISM. I. PERHAPS some of our readers are still ignorant of […]