Timeline
of Josiah Warren's Life
George
Santayana in Persons and Places
describes the "Brighton Warrens" as "a dissentient family."
His first American ancestor, John Warren, is said in The History of
Watertown to have been
arrested for non-attendance at church and harboring Quakers. Bailie says that
"The Warrens of Pilgrim lineage from which he sprang have furnished
Massachusetts with many distinguished citizens, of whom the most renowned was
General Joseph Warren, the Revolutionary hero killed by the British at Bunker
Hill" (p. 1), but any direct connection to Joseph Warren appears
speculative.
1793:
[William Godwin: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice]
1798:
Born, Boston, Mass.
1805:
[Birth of Emerson], [Birth of Garrison]
1809:
[Birth of Proudhon]
1818,
Jan. 3 - April 7: Musical engagements in places in and around Boston; marries
Caroline Cutter.
1819:
Moves west with his wife and settles in Cincinnati, Ohio
1821
(Reichert) or 1823 (Bailie): Patents lard (as opposed to tallow) burning lamp.
"The patent documents for the lard lamp were signed by President John
Quincy Adams. The patents on the printing presses invented by my father were
issued under the signature of Andrew Jackson, and B. F. Butler, in 1835"
(George Warren). That is, he humorously falsified the patent data.
1824:
Robert Owen visits Cincinnati; Warren joins the nascent New Harmony experiment,
in which Owen purchased the town of New Harmony (or Harmonie) from the Rappites
(Harmonists), a German Protestant sect.
1825-27:
New Harmony, IN, as music director etc. New Harmony was established in Indiana
by the British industrialist and utopian thinker Owen. Owen prescribed
community of property, possibly under the influence of the Rappites and
Shakers. New Harmony was probably the first secular ideal community in America.
Warren lived there from almost start to almost finish, supervising its music
program. Fanny Wright is there and gone and back again. The failure of the
community has been blamed on the fact that some residents were essentially
spongers on Owen's wealth, and that agreement on uses of community property
could not be arrived at by the extremely various and eccentric inhabitants.
These failures gave rise to Warren's doctrines of individual sovereignty and
defense of property. Robert Dale Owen (the founder's son) in The Atlantic described his delight in the musical
performances, with "an excellent band leader, Josiah Warren. This was a
performance of music, instrumental and vocal, much beyond what I expected in
the backwoods."
May
1827-May 18 1829: Time Store, Cincinnati. In downtown Cincinnati, later at
Utopia, back at New Harmony (1840s) and at Modern Times (1850s), Warren
established Time Stores, which were employed labor notes as the circulating
medium. Each Time Store would become the center of a cooperative, equitable
economy. In every case, particularly the first, the experiment was a dramatic
success. In fact, Kenneth Rexroth asserts that the Time Store was "the
most popular retail business in the city."[i]
Son George Warren born. "At four years old the boy was taught to use
carpenter's tools. At seven he learned type-setting and composed a tiny book
with pages one inch square. . . . He was a musician, and at seventeen began to
teach for a living. At eighteen he built an organ, fashioning it from the raw
material. It was sold at the current price of such instruments. Being a
practical wood-worker, he made the best paling fence in the town. He was also
skilled in the use of pencil and brush, and, as one of his sources of income,
painted some of the most artistic signs in that part of the country. . . . When
he was twenty-one he was noted as a composer of band music, and was an expert
performer on the Clarinet, French Horn, Cornet, Violin, and 'Cello"
(Bailie).
1828:
Visited at home in Cincinnati by Frances Wright. [Alexander Bryant Johnson's The
Philosophy of Human Knowledge
published; read by both Warren and Wright. Later revised and re-published as A
Treatise on Language.]
The village of Kendal, near the Tuscarawas River in Ohio, originally settled by
the Quakers Thomas and Charity Rotch, was a small-scale Owenite community that
apparently made a transition to Warren principles, as reported by Warren to the
Free Enquirer late in
1830, where he said the experiment had been conducted for two years. Warren,
however, was living in Cincinnati. The Producers' Exchange of Labour for Labour
Association formed in Philadelphia on Owen/Warren principles; markets patent
medicines at cost.
1830:
Visits Fanny Wright in New York. Conducts educational experiments at Spring
Hill, Ohio, near Massillon and Kendal, with a group of 25 children, whom he
resolves to treat as autonomous individuals. System of apprenticeships
established on a labor-for-labor basis. Warren perfects the continuous-feed
printing press (in a letter dated 1853, he says he 'has had these experiments
in hand for twenty-three years'). He was already describing his innovations in
printing to the Free Enquirer
in a communication dated January 10, 1830, and must have been working on the
technology through much of the 1820s.
1831:
Establishes the first "equitable village," encompassing four hundred
acres and a half-dozen families on the Tuscarawas River. Martin terms this
"the first anarchist community in America." Experiment ended by
disease among the families by 1837.
[William
Lloyd Garrison publishes the first number of The Liberator.]
1832:
Cholera epidemic in Cincinnati. Warren was able to provide extremely cheap and
fast printing of health information, at cost, through use of his type-casting
techniques and continuous-feed press.
1833:
Warren operates a steam-powered sawmill on a labor-for-labor basis, presumably
in Tuscawaras County, Ohio. This is the first venture in the community known as
Equity, to which Warren removes. The Peaceful Revolutionist published, the plates cast on the family
stove at the Equity community. Warren writes the following poem about Frances
Wright's sister, who died in 1831.
Written
on Hearing Unwelcome News
They say
tis best to be deceived
When sad
realities would break the heart:
O would I
could be thus relieved
When
moral meteors like thee depart.
Ah! vain
the thought - We seldom find
A friend
like thee in all mankind
And when
thou'rt gone can we caress thee
And think
thee here when most we miss thee?
Ah no -
Then let the poor, the weak,
The
injured, talented and meek
Prepare
to hear what I most dread
To tell -
Their friend Camilla's dead.
O would
that death could be controlled
By tears,
by reason or by gold
These in
excess thy friends would give -
E'en die
for thee, couldst thou but live.
Thy
doting sister too, when oft reclined
Fatigued
and worn, will call to mind
Thy
gentle, soothing, watchful care -
Will call
"Camilla" but thou wilt not hear.
She has
thee not; but now alone
Feels
every moment, thou art gone!
Kind
friends around us strive in vain
To place
her as she was, again.
She lives
now but to haste the day
(and
knows her aid can speed its coming)
When, if
sweet flowers too soon decay
They'll
leave as sweet, around us blooming.
1834:
Warren returns to New Harmony.
1835:
Warren community re-established in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. "The first
village was attempted in Tuscarawas Co., Ohio, in 1835. Six families were on
the ground - 24 persons in all. 23 of them had the ague or some other bileous
complaint some portion of the first year! We became alarmed and dared not
invite any friends to join us. We thought we would try one more year; but these
complaints prevailed as before, and in addition to them, the influenza carried
off twelve, mostly young, vigorous, healthy people within a circle of thirty
families of the neighborhood, within two weeks. We now resolved to get away
from the locality as soon as possible, and we did so, at the almost total
sacrifice of buildings, furniture, and land, but with the view of concentrating
again when our shattered finances had been recruited" (Practical
Applications).
1836:
[Emerson, Nature]
1840:
[Proudhon: What is Property?]
1841:
[Emerson's Essays: First Series.]
One-off periodical Herald of Equity published at Cincinnati.
1842: New
Harmony Time Store. "In March 1842 another store (just like that in
Cincinnati in 1827) was set in operation in New Harmony, the old seat of Mr.
Owen's communistic experiments. This store worked with an immense power in
revolutionizing the retail trade in that region. It consumed about three
years" (Practical Applications).
Publishes the one-off periodical Gazette of Equitable Commerce at New Harmony
1844:
New, "mathematical" musical notation published; Peaceful Revolutionist (vol 2. no 1) published as pamphlet.
Publicly exhibits a new printing press in New York; prototype of the later
high-speed presses. The principle was so simple that "there was no
equitable ground for a patent, and it was given to the public" (Bailie
quoting Warren, 84). Invents "universal typography," apparently a
cheap way of casting type. Publishes The Letter on Equitable Commerce at New Harmony, perhaps the best example
of the charms and drawbacks of Warrenian printing processes; it's all in italics,
with resort to multiple whole alphabet styles and families, some of them or
even all of them no doubt of Warren's design.
1846:
First edition of Equitable Commerce,
New Harmony. According to Martin, the second edition was published in 1849 at
Utopia, Ohio. No doubt these were tiny self-printed editions. Wunderlich:
"On 25 April 1846. . . . the 'first American patent on rubber stereotyping
plates' was granted to Warren. This stereotyping device, mixing shellac, tar,
and sand, combined with gum arabic, beeswax, stearine, tallow, and oil as a
substitute for type metal, was used by the Smithsonian Institution for its
first book catalog in 1851" (p. 20).
1847:
Establishment of Utopia, Ohio (Claremont County) With some resources derived
from printing, Warren bought a village that had previously been a small
Fourierist phalanx on the Ohio River. Houses were built - again with perhaps 6
families, who began destitute. Utopia was a small-scale success. Martin says that in 1852 the population
was around 100. "Mr. E.G, Cubberly, one of the first settlers, in October
1872, while still residing at Utopia, wrote: "The labor notes put us into
a reciprocating society - the result was, 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
was $9.81 - all the rest was effected by exchanging labor for labor" (Practical
Applications). This
village apparently persisted long after Warren had gone east, and eventually
removed to Minnesota, displaced, like many an ideal community, by land
speculation. A village called Utopia still exists at this location.
1848:
[Thoreau: "Civil Disobedience."] Visits (moves to?) Boston. Meets William B. Greene and signs his
petition to establish a mutual bank (Martin). Probably in this year becomes
acquainted with Andrews and several other prominent reformers, including George
Henry Evans, Joshua K. Ingalls, and Lewis Masquerier.
1849:
[Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.] Lectures at Hancock Hall, Boston on
Sundays throughout January, February, and March. It is here that Andrews hears
him and is converted to his principles, beginning an extended collaboration to
which we really owe the fact that we know Warren at all.
1850:
Moves to New York City and conducts "parlor conversations" on his
principles (Bailie, p. 58). Letters in the collection of the Indiana Historical
Society indicate that Warren set up a press operation, including manufacturing
type, for John P. Jewett, a Boston publisher. In 1852, Jewett issued the first
edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which of course raises the possibility
that this epochal novel was first printed using Warren's apparatus.
1851: Foundation
of Modern Times on Long Island. Equitable commerce/self-sovereign community
established by Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews (who owned a house there but
never lived in it). Lots were sold on the cost principle. Again, destitute
families were able to build homes. Eventually, it started attracting anyone
whose lifestyle was not conventional, including people living with partners
other than their spouses, as well as advocates of free love - Victoria Woodhull
was about, for example - and a variety of fads, such as spiritualism, nudism,
the all-bean diet, the water cure, and the amazing philosophy of Pearl Andrews.
Warren writes: "Whoever tries what is vulgarly known as 'free love' . . .
will find it more troublesome than a crown of thorns: and there is not much
danger of its becoming contagious where the results of the experiment are made
known" (Periodical Letter).
It was eventually torn apart under the weight of Horace Greeley's publicity in
the New York Tribune.
Thomas and Mary Gove Nichols made it notorious by mailing sex education guides
and advocating promiscuity. Then they moved to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and tried
celibacy. First they were spiritualists, then conservative Catholics. In short
(like (I hate to say it) Victoria and her sister Tennessee Claflin), they were
not serious people, rather post-apocalyptic faddists. But within reason Modern
Times was a success, despite the occasional nudist or visitation by malevolent
spirits, for some ten years for a hundred people or more. Community more or less
seamlessly became the town of Brentwood during the 1860s. Caroline Warren stays
behind in New Harmony, and perhaps Josiah is co-resident with another woman
(Wunderlich).
1851:
Stephen Pearl Andrews publishes The Science of Society, expounding Warren's ideas with eclectic
bits of Comte and Fourier thrown in.
1852: 3rd
(canonical) edition of Equitable Commerce published by Fowler and Wells, edited by Andrews. Also its
"how-to companion" (Wunderlich) Practical Details in Equitable
Commerce, which describes
equity experiments from the Time Store to the foundation of Modern Times Debate commences in the New York
Tribune among Horace
Greeley, Henry James Sr., and Pearl Andrews on marriage and free love, focusing
prurient attention on Modern Times.
[Lysander Spooner: An Essay on Trial By Jury.]
1854-58: Periodical
Letter published at
Modern Times.
1855,
&c.: House of Equity (Boston) Established by Warren follower [?] Keith, who
conceived it as an urban community center, with equitable stores, lectures,
recreational areas, printing facilities etc. Warren helped conceive and execute
the plan, which eventually collapsed when Keith's finances did.
1858: It
seems likely that Warren was resident in the Boston area by this date. The Dual
Commerce Association formed on Warren principles (though the extent of Warren's
involvement is imperfectly clear; the proprietor is listed as T.J. Lewis). It
was essentially an equitable food store. The wage of the "distributors or
merchants" was set at two dollars a day, based on a labor calculation. The
project, which was described in a proposal dated July 1, 1858 and then reported
on in a tract dated January 1, 1859, is striking for its size, and should make
us re-think the scale of Warrenian equitable experiments. The Jan 1 tract is
not Warren's writing, but quotes an earlier advertisement that certainly is.
The central store was located in the basement of the Pelham Hotel, with other
"stations" in different poor neighborhoods in the city, six in all,
each staffed by a man and a woman, 20 employees altogether. The basic system
was consignment: farmers still owned their produce until sold, and price did
not vary by quantity. The Jan 1 report says that "several thousands of
individuals have already begun to experience the benefits growing out of the
movement." Milk was priced at "five cents per quart in winter, four
in summer." The distribution is described as 500 quarts of milk per day;
50 barrels of flour per week (at 50 cents); 6000 pounds of soap per month; 5000
bushels of Nova Scotia potatoes per month (five cents a bushel "if taken
from the boat, or ten cents when delivered at the homes of consumers"),
and so on. From the earlier advertisement by Warren: "'Dual commerce'
expresses those commercial relations which result and develope between producer
and consumer, instead of being the absorbent of both." Unknown how or when
the DCA was dissolved.
1863:
Lives in Boston area; association with Ezra Heywood and the nascent labor
movement. True Civilization
published. An equitable commerce store established (contact "Nath'l G.
Simonds, No. 189 Main St., Charlestown"), apparently on a pretty small
scale. (This project identified by Shawn Wilbur in the form of an
advertisement, in the Boston Investigator, Vol. XXXII, No. 50, April 15, 1863, p. 393.)
1866:
Resident at Cliftondale, Mass. According to Martin (p. 98), Warren "made
preliminary preparations for the setting up of [communities] in Jamaica and
Central America."
1872:
Princeton, Mass. At the Spring meeting of the New England Labor Reform League,
Warren, Ezra Heywood, William B. Greene, and a young and impressionable
Benjamin Tucker are all present: possibly the greatest summit meeting of
American anarchists. Publication of Warren's last book(let): Practical
Applications.
1874: Death
claims Josiah Warren, individually. According to Bailie, services were held at
the Bulfinch Place Unitarian Church, and Warren buried at the Mount Auburn
Cemetery.