William Batchelder Greene

American minister and activist (1819–1878)

William Batchelder Greene

Born	(1819-04-04)April 4, 1819 Haverhill, Massachusetts, US
Died	May 30, 1878(1878-05-30) (aged 59) Somerset, England
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Anarchist, minister, political scientist
Known for	Mutual Banking

Academic background
Alma mater	Harvard (1841)
Thesis	De cosinuum et sinuum potestatibus secundum cosinus et sinus arcuum multiplicium evolvendis / von Ernst Eduard Kummer (1832)
Academic work
Doctoral students	Paul Du Bois-Reymond

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William Batchelder Greene (April 4, 1819 – May 30, 1878) was an American individualist anarchist, Unitarian minister, soldier, mutualist,^[1] promoter of free banking in the United States, and member of the First International.^[2]

Biography

Born in Haverhill, Massachusetts, Greene was the son of the Democratic journalist and Boston postmaster Nathaniel Greene. He was appointed to the United States Military Academy from Massachusetts in 1835, but he left before graduation. He was made 2nd lieutenant in the 7th infantry in July 1839 and after serving in the second Seminole War resigned in November 1841. Subsequently, he was connected with George Ripley's utopian movement at Brook Farm, after which he met several transcendentalists including Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth Peabody and Ralph Waldo Emerson.^[3]

According to James J. Martin in Men Against the State, Greene did not become a "full-fledged anarchist" until the last decade of his life, but his writings show that by 1850 he had articulated a Christian mutualism, drawing heavily on the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's sometimes-antagonist Pierre Leroux (see Equality; 1849 and Mutual Banking; 1850), writing in The Radical Deficiency of Existing Circulating Medium (1857):

The existing organization of credit is the daughter of hard money, begotten upon it incestuously by that insufficiency of circulating medium which results from laws making specie the sole legal tender. The immediate consequences of confused credit are want of confidence, loss of time, commercial frauds, fruitless and repeated applications for payment, complicated with irregular and ruinous expanses. The ultimate consequences are compositions, bad debts, expensive accommodation-loans, law-suits, insolvency, bankruptcy, separation of classes, hostility, hunger, extravagance, distress, riots, civil war, and, finally, revolution. The natural consequences of mutual banking are, first of all, the creation of order, and the definitive establishment of due organization in the social body, and, ultimately, the cure of all the evils. which flow from the present incoherence and disruption in the relations of production and commerce.

In his radical, anonymously published pamphlet Equality, Greene had this to say about equality before the law: "It is right that persons should be equal before the law: but when we have established equality before the law, our work is but half done. We ought to have EQUAL LAWS also". His comments were directed towards the creation of corporations.^[4]

Greene spent his final days in Somerset, England. His remains were transported to Boston to be buried at Forest Hills, Roxbury (Jamaica Plain).^[5]

Noted works

Mutual Banking. Boston: New England Labor Reform League, 1870.
Remarks on the Science of History, followed by an a priori Autobiography (1849).
Equality Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine. West Brookfield, Mass.: O.S. Cooke, 1849.
Mutual Banking Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine. West Brookfield, Mass.: O.S. Cooke, 1850.
Sovereignty of the People, pamphlet (Boston, 1863).
Heywood, Ezra and William B. Greene. Declaration of Sentiments and Constitution of the New England Labor Reform League Archived 2018-12-04 at the Wayback Machine. Boston, Weekly American Workman, 1869.
Explanations of the Theory of the Calculus, pamphlet (1870).
Transcendentalism, pamphlet (1870).
Theory of the Calculus (1870).
The Facts of Consciousness and the Philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, pamphlet (1871).
The Blazing Star: With an Appendix Treating of the Jewish Kabbala. Also, a Tract on the Philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer and One on New-England Transcendentalism. Boston: A. William and Co., 1872.
The Working Woman: A letter to the Rev. Henry W. Foote, Minister of King's Chapel, in vindication of the poorer class of the Boston working-women. Princeton, Mass.: Co-operative Pub. Co. (1873).
Socialistic, Communistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments (1875).
International Address: An elaborate, comprehensive, and very entertaining Exposition of the principles of the Working-People's International Association.

References

^ Martin, James J. Men Against the State. Ralph Myles Publisher Inc.: Colorado. 1970. pp. 135. “Coming at a time when the labor and consumer groups were experimenting with the ‘associated workshops’ and ‘protective union stores,’ Greene suggested that the mutual bank be incorporated in the movement, forming what he called ‘complementary units of production, consumption, and exchange,…the triple formula of practical mutualism.’ This program of mutualism he considered best adapted to local community level.”
^ Woodcock, George (1962). Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Melbourne: Penguin. p. 434.
^ Wayne, Tiffany K. (2014). Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-1438109169.
^ Sarat, Austin (September 2016). 10.3M – Rhetorical Processes and Legal Judgments: How Language and Arguments Shape. ISBN 978-1107155503. Retrieved May 14, 2014.
^ Wilbur, Shawn (November 14, 2007). "Masonic Tribute to William B. Greene". Libertarian Labyrinth. Retrieved July 28, 2019.

External links

William Batchelder Greene. Libertarian Labyrinth.
Ruch, John (August 2007). "Anarchy in JP: Greene was early local radical" Archived 2007-09-28 at the Wayback Machine. Jamaica Plain Gazette.
"In Memoriam". (1878). A tribute by the Massachusetts Masons.
"Greene, Nathaniel" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900.
The Radical Pamphlet Collection at the Library of Congress has material written by Greene.