Benjamin Ricketson Tucker

• Benjamin Ricketson Tucker
• Born: April 17, 1854
• Died: June 22, 1939

Editor and anarchist, was the only child of Abner Ricketson Tucker and Caroline A. (Cummings) Tucker, who resided in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, at the time of his birth. His father, who had another son by a previous marriage, was a prosperous wholesale grocer and ship chandler. Both parents were of colonial New England lineage, his father a Quaker and his mother a Unitarian. After graduating from Friends’ Academy in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1870, Tucker attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) until 1873.

During his college years he became interested in the labor movement, woman suffrage, prohibition, and politics. In 1872 he organized a Greeley-Brown Club in New Bedford to promote the presidential candidacy of Horace Greeley and that of his vice-presidential running mate, Benjamin Gratz Brown. Earlier that year, Tucker met Josiah Warren and William B. Greene, pioneers of what was to be called individualist anarchism (as opposed to anarchist communism) at a meeting of the New England Labor Reform League. Tucker became friends with them and with Lysander Spooner. Tucker became converted to the doctrine that, as he later espoused it, held that all activities should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations and that the state should be abolished. He condemned monopolies but disliked communism because of its restrictions and curtailment of individual liberty. He and others in this school of the anarchist movement opposed violence in pursuit of their goals.

In 1872 Tucker also became involved with the headline-making radical and feminist Victoria Claflin Woodhull, fifteen years his senior, and during their brief liaison Woodhull accompanied him on the first of his trips to France after leaving MIT. In France Tucker studied works by the well-known French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon, on whom he became an authority. Tucker was Proudhon’s chief American adherent. In 1876 he translated Proudhon’s work with the title What is Property? and published it using his own scanty funds. His later translation of Mikhail A. Bakunin’s God and the State was considered an important event in furthering the anarchist cause.

Tucker began to write for The Word, a radical publication edited by Ezra H. Hey wood, in 1872 and became associate editor in April 1875. He resigned in December 1876 because of a disagreement with Heywood, who he believed was neglecting labor issues in the journal.

Tucker joined the editorial staff of the Boston Globe in 1878 and remained for eleven years. He founded the Radical Review, a quarterly, in May 1877. It ceased publication after one year, but by that time he had become the leader of the individualist anarchists. He continued to translate novels, poems, and political works, pricing them to fit the budgets of working people although that meant financial loss for himself. In 1889 he published The Transatlantic, a literary monthly, for about a year, and Five Stories a Week magazine for an even briefer period.

Tucker founded his most famous publication, Liberty, in August 1881, and continued it until 1908. The first issue ended with a defiant statement of purpose: “Monopoly and privilege must be destroyed, opportunity afforded, and competition encouraged. This is Liberty’s work and ‘Down with Authority’ her war-cry.” The periodical printed much of the radical and unorthodox writings of the country during its twenty-eight years and was widely noted. Tucker wrote much of the material in each issue and when he moved from Boston to New York City in 1892 to join the editorial staff of Engineering Magazine, the offices of Liberty were transferred there. In 1893 he published a compilation of material from his journal, Instead of a Book by a Man Too Busy to Write One; and in 1899 State Socialism and Anarchism, a comparison. That same year he was spokesman for the anarchist position on the trust issue at the Chicago Civic Federation’s historic Conference on Trusts.

Tucker’s writing style was dogmatic and fiery. He used sarcasm and invective freely, although in person he was genial and kind. He practiced the anarchism that he preached. He never voted because he believed that “rule is evil,” and was once jailed for refusing to pay taxes. Many of the tenets of individualist anarchism as propounded by Tucker in Liberty and other writings have influenced libertarian movements to the present time. He argued against state control of social reform and for the freedom of the individual to conduct his own life and be responsible for its development. He feared a large, powerful government that could foster and condone war, and he opposed all bureaucracies whether political, industrial, or educational.

When Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was banned, Tucker defied the authorities and worked to get it sold. Whitman later said of him: “Tucker did brave things for Leaves of Grass when brave things were rare. I could never forget that.... I love him: he is plucky to the bone.”

Tucker’s comments in Liberty on women’s issues often brought him into conflict with women in the anarchist movement and with other feminists. He disagreed with their crusade for equal pay for equal work. “There exists the general inferiority of women as workers,” he insisted; even skilled women show “a lack of ambition, of self-reliance, of a sense of responsibility.” Although he argued for birth control in the 1880s and considered that marriage made women playthings and slaves, he showed no understanding of the conflict experienced by women who wanted both marriage and outside careers—a conflict clearly perceptible to feminists of the era. Commenting on an actual case, he stung them with his waspish prose, dismissing “Mary Ann’s” choice as the “freedom of celibacy without Peter and the slavery of marriage with Peter. . . . She wanted Peter more than she wanted freedom.”

Tucker believed that “legal marriage and legal divorce are equal absurdities” and never married. When almost fifty, he met a young woman, Pearl Johnson, and lived with her until his death. They had one daughter, Oriole, born in New York City in 1908.

The publication of Liberty ended suddenly in April 1908 when a fire destroyed its uninsured plant and the stock of a nonprofit mail-order bookshop Tucker had established. He had long wanted to live in France, and the loss of his journal hastened his decision to leave the United States. He had inherited enough from his mother to support his family abroad. He left at the end of 1908 and settled in Nice, where he attempted unsuccessfully to reestablish his work. In 1926 he and his family moved to Monaco. He died at eighty-five in Pont Ste. Devote, Monaco, and was buried there.

In addition to the works cited above, Tucker wrote Why I Am an Anarchist (1934) and The Attitude of Anarchism Toward Industrial Combinations (1903). Manuscript and pamphlet files are in the Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan Library. Bound volumes and microfilm copies of Liberty, vols. 1-17, August 1881—April 1908, are at the New York Public Library. There is no full-length biography of Tucker, but comprehensive studies can be found in R. Rocker, Pioneers of American Freedom (1949) and C. A. Madison, Critics & Crusaders (1947). See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1958); M. S. Marsh, Anarchist Women 1870-1920 (1981); J. J. Martin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908 (1970); C. L. Swartz, Individual Liberty (1926); and C. A. Sprading, Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913).