Josiah Warren

Individualist, anarchist, and inventor, was born in Boston of Puritan ancestry, a descendant of Gen. Joseph Warren, who was killed by the British at Bunker Hill. Little is known of his early years except that he showed musical talent and was a member of the Boston Brigade Band. He married at twenty and had a son, George Washington Warren.

Around 1815 Warren moved to Cincinnati, then a small town on the edge of western settlement, where he taught music and was a band leader. In 1821 he patented a lamp for burning lard instead of the much more expensive tallow, and set up a profitable lamp-manufacturing company.

When Robert Dale Owen, a wealthy New York reformer, gave a series of lectures in Cincinnati, Warren became converted to his ideas of communal living. Deciding to join Owen’s new utopian colony at New Harmony, Indiana, he sold his lamp company and in early 1825 moved there with his family and 900 others. The colony lasted two years, and that experience convinced Warren that the basis for social reform must be the complete freedom of each individual. He believed that New Harmony failed because its communistic way of life suppressed individuality and led to lack of initiative and responsibility.

Warren returned to Cincinnati and in May 1827 opened what he called an Equity Store, an idea originating with Owen, and the seed of the future cooperative movement. Merchandise was sold on the basis of an exchange of labor and time, with all work equal, skilled or unskilled. Warren sold goods at cost plus a seven percent charge to cover store maintenance and the time of the salesman. He issued “labor notes,” similar in size and design to paper money of the time, with blanks to fill in with the proper goods and labor or services. For example, a bolt of cloth might be sold for a “labor note” stating that thirty minutes of carpentry work or ten minutes of sewing were due Josiah Warren on demand.

The store was a popular success, called by many the “time store,” and some patrons followed Warren’s plan to the letter. One farmer, arriving for a barrel of mackerel known to cost eight dollars, hurriedly threw down the exact amount on the counter and called out: “I want a barrel of your mackerel here is the money and there is a cent for your time you need not come out I know where they are goodbye.”

Warren, side-whiskered, solidly built, and energetic, followed his own theories with rare integrity. During this period he lent a sum of money for two weeks and refused to take more than fourteen cents as a fee, saying that it took him five minutes to lend and five minutes to get back and his rate was a just one when a working man earned fifty cents for a whole day’s effort.

Owen, editor and owner of The Free Enquirer, published in New York, urged Warren to go there, promising to provide money to establish communities based on Warren’s ideas of equity and the “sovereignty of the individual.” In mid-1830 Warren moved to New York where he wrote for the Enquirer and influenced Frances Wright, an abolitionist who had been at New Harmony. She wrote most Enquirer editorials and through them and other articles spread Warren’s ideas.

Owen unexpectedly departed for Europe on business, leaving Warren without funds to pursue his goals, and in the spring of 1831 he again returned to Cincinnati. He began experiments to eliminate the long apprenticeship system in the trades, trying to make basic crafts like carpentry, iron work, spinning, and especially printing, simpler and cheaper, an effort he believed no capitalist owner would consider. He invented a new press but thought the concept too simple to patent. It was publicly exhibited in 1832; soon after Hoe & Co. began profitably making a similar machine.

A cholera epidemic swept Cincinnati in 1832. For several months Warren printed on his new press thousands of leaflets explaining symptoms and treatment of the disease, all at his own expense, and distributed them throughout the afflicted city. Music was still his vocation, and during the time of cholera deaths Warren could be seen almost daily at the head of bands playing marches at public funerals for prominent Cincinnati citizens.

In January 1833 Warren began publishing The Peaceful Revolutionist, a four-page weekly that lasted less than a year. He learned to work steel and made his own type molds, type, and plates, which he cast over the fire of the kitchen stove where his wife cooked the family meals.

Early in 1835, Warren and a group of friends bought 400 acres in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, and started the village of Equity. Several houses and a sawmill were built, but the area was malarial, and the experiment lasted only two years. The residents lost most of their investment. Warren returned in 1837 to New Harmony, a thriving town but no longer a utopian community. In 1841 he published his first book. Manifesto. From 1842 to 1844 he operated another Equity Store, so successful that other merchants had to reduce their prices, at which time people resumed trading with them, and Warren closed his store. In 1844 he invented a system of music using mathematical notation, and later wrote a book on the subject, Written Music Remodeled, and Invested With the Simplicity of an Exact Science (1860).

During the New Harmony years, Warren designed and built a new kind of press, self-inking with twenty-three rollers and paper fed from a roll. He called it his speed press because it could print sixty copies a minute as compared to previous presses that could turn out only five or six. The press was installed in February 1840 at The South-Western Sentinel in Evansville, Indiana. where the pressmen, fearful of their jobs because of the machine’s efficiency, continually sabotaged its workings until Warren took it out of the plant and broke it up. High-speed cylinder (roller) presses were not used until twenty-five years later, when others won the credit and rewards for Warren’s inventions.

In 1844 and 1845 Warren invented a cheaper and simpler stereotyping process, including color printing and half-tone effects, on which today’s stereotyping processes are based. With $7,000 from the sale of these patents, he bought land thirty miles from Cincinnati on the Ohio River for another Equity village, which he called Utopia. In 1846 he wrote Equitable Commerce. and in May 1847 he opened another Equity Store at Utopia. In June 1847, Warren and several destitute families platted out the small community, and by December most had solid homes. Said an original settler, E. G. Cubberley: “In two years twelve families found themselves with homes who never owned them before . . . Labor capital did it. I built a brick cottage one and a half stories high, and all the money I paid out was $9.81—all the rest was effected by exchanging labor for labor. Mr. Warren is right, and the way to get back as much labor as we give is by the labor-cost prices—money prices, with no principle to guide, have always deceived us.” Within three years, this community also failed, due in part to land speculation in the area. Most of the villagers moved to Minnesota where land was cheap and plentiful.

Warren moved to New York in 1850 and met Stephen Pearl Andrews, who became a follower. Through Andrews’s lectures and writings, Warren’s theories became more widely known. Warren also held meetings called “Parlor Conversations” at which he talked informally about his ideas. He called the basis of his philosophy the “sovereignty of the individual,” a phrase used, with attribution, by John Stuart Mill in his essay “Liberty.” Warren saw each person as a law unto himself, but always exercising that “sovereignty” with due regard to the equal rights of others. He favored an individualistic rather than communistic form of cooperation, and although not against profit-making, believed that equity demanded that opportunities to produce wealth should be accessible to all on equal terms. He believed that any government service could be provided cheaper and more efficiently by individual efforts spontaneously meeting society’s needs.

In the early 1850s Warren established the colony of Modern Times on Long Island, forty miles from New York City. It was successful for about ten years, later changing its name to Brentwood. In 1854 Warren began publishing Periodical Letters, which appeared irregularly until the end of 1858. When A. C. Cuddon of London visited Modern Times, Warren made over to him his English patent rights for his printing inventions to be used to further his cause.

Warren moved to Boston in 1861 and never returned to Modern Times. In 1863 he wrote True Civilization an Immediate Necessity. Little is known of his last years. In 1872 he met Benjamin R. Tucker at a meeting of the New England Labor Reform League. Tucker became a disciple and spread the theories of individualist anarchism. In 1873 Warren went to live with friends, Mr. and Mrs. Edward D. Linton, in Boston, and wrote True Civilization: A Subject of Vital and Serious Interest to all People, which was published in 1875. During the last months of his life, Warren was nursed at the Linton home by Kate Metcalf, one of the settlers of Modern Times. He died of “dropsy,” probably some form of arteriosclerotic heart disease, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge. At his wish, no headstone was erected.

The best source of Warren’s life and philosophy is W. Bailie, Josiah Warren, the First American Anarchist (1906). See also J. J. Martin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908 (1970); C. T. Sprading, Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1913); G. B. Lockwood, The New Harmony Movement (1903); V. Dyson, A Century of Brentwood (1950); S. P. Andrews, The Basic Outline of Universology (1872) and other writings; M.

D. Conway, Autobiography (1904); and the writings of B. R. Tucker. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936). An obituary appeared in the Boston Globe on April 15, 1874.