Fair Use Blog

215. Chivalry

(Columbus Daily Ohio State Journal [Lincoln], June 3, 1861)

Some of the best words in our language have been prostituted to the basest uses. What term is in such bad odor as "affinity," for instance, since its adoption into the vocabulary of the pestilent Free Lovers. Yet no more corrupt office does it perform than the word written above. "Chivalry" once had a noble meaning. We naturally associate with it the high tone of the ancient warriors, who disdained to strike an unarmed antagonist, and who would defend to the last even a foe who had eaten salt with them. But in the progress of time, with its changes, [536] we find the import of words accommodating itself to the habits, the thoughts and vices of men even. The civilization of slavery, which gilds treason into "peaceful separation," humiliating concessions into "compromises," and theft and robbery into an "accumulation of means," readily transforms cowardly ruffianism, simply, into "chivalry."

From the time Virginia first made negro-breeding her forte, South Carolina furnished a fine crop of poltroon tories for Marion's bullets, and Louisiana opened her arms to receive the harlots and cut-throats of France--our Southern brethren have monopolized all the chivalry of the entire Western Continent. They couldn't hear to the possession of a lingering spark of this element in the pleb[e]ian masses of the North, who work for a living, build churches and school-houses, construct railroads, pay their debts and fear God. These base Puritans never swagger. They have no servile population to bully. They consume a less amount of coarse tobacco and poor whisky, and have failed to reach the apex in brutal profanity and general beastliness. Hence their want of chivalry. Could these pitiable creatures be induced to embrace the saving grace of African slavery, repudiate their just debts, conspire against the Government, steal its property, the merchants turn their trading vessels into pirate ships, abolish the free school systems, devote themselves to dissipation, not forgetting the amusement, when maddened with "tangle-foot," to stab or shoot some unoffending, unarmed neighbor in the back, they might yet possibly redeem themselves.

This Southern chivalry takes on many shapes. It is as various as the different degrees of ignorance and brutality of its champions. To cudgel a United States Senator in his seat, of his guard and with no means of defence, beating him with a bludgeon within an inch of his life, while other armed ruffians stand near to see that the job is thoroughly executed, is the height of South Carolina chivalry and daring. It made no hero of the perpetrator of such a deed, and had not Providence so signally shown his hand, this same drunken bully would now doubtless be occupying a high seat in the rebel synagogue of the South.

The chivalry of Missouri assumed a form in Kansas which is yet fresh in the public mind. There Clark and Gardner, vieing [sic] with each other in the display of valor, stole behind one Barber, guilty of entertaining Free State notions, and fired their rifles at his back. He fell dead, but it was impossible to determine which hero had taken him off. A pro-slavery President got along with the matter, however, by appointing one Post Master and the other Purser in the Navy. In Kansas, too, was where Hopps, another Free State agitator, was scalped by Murphy, who was rewarded with an Indian Agency; where a Free State town was [537] battered down and pillaged, everything portable being carried off; where a son of the old martyr Brown, a prisoner and unarmed, was hacked to pieces by a hatchet in the hands of one Gibson--where, in short, butchering Free State men and laying waste their property was the chief employment of the Missouri braves for two or three years.

Later we find the chivalry of Texas--after that State has committed the most disgraceful treason, and resorted to the most dishonorable means to capture the loyal soldiers of the Federal Government--cropping out in the paying of respects to a Massachusetts woman. It was discovered by the chivalric citizens of San Antonio that this unprotected female was guilty of the heinous offense of having been born in Boston. It was inferrable from this, of course, that she did not regard the system of African slavery as a little ahead of the atonement in the regeneration of a fallen world, and she was surrounded by the daring sons of the South, who led her into the public streets, stripped her bare, applied a soothing, unctuous plaster of tar to her naked person, set off with an outer covering of down, rode her in state around the public square on an unpolished rail, with a secession flag on either side, the march accompanied by the musical yells of an excited mob. It is not uncommon for slave women to be stripped and lashed, in the South; and the above incident but shows that Southern character is progressing in the natural direction. We are constrained to believe there is yet some show for Sodom and Gamorrah in the last day.

After this chivalry has thieved and robbed until there was nothing else to lay its hands on, and plotted the most damnable treason, setting up its vileness against the Federal Government, it asks to be recognized as an independent power, and intimates a desire to carry on war after the civilized programme. It commences this war, however, by setting seven or eight thousands of its bullies on a starving garrison of seventy soldiers, and when discovered that the post the latter held was wrapped in flames, the braves plied the red-hot shot the more furiously. The Southern chivalric plan of warfare continues as it began, and is, in fact, but an expansion of its ruffianism and assassinations in time of peace. Bribes have been offered our faithful soldiers, who were guarding entrances to forts, and sentinels have been shot down at their posts by concealed foes. The lives of entire regiments have been attempted through poisoned liquors, dealt out as if from friendly hands.--The slaveholding Indians of Arkansas and North Carolina have been instigated to visit their savage atrocities upon the loyal citizens of the United States when fitting opportunity should offer.

The assassin's dagger and bullet, the savage's tomahawk and scalping [538]knife, arsenic, prus[s]ic acid and strychnine are to be the weapons of chivalry in this war. Oh Dahomey! Ye cannibal realms of the South Pacific! hold up your heads!

Howard Cecil Perkins, ed. Northern Editorials on Secession, Volume I (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964), 535-538.

This is an item from a 1916 issue of The American Printer (Vol. 62.12), printed at New York. I noticed it and clipped it out because it's about the career of Horace E. Carr, a Cleveland-area printer (active in the Cleveland arts scene, influenced by the work of William Morris, and also a friend of the individualist anarchist Fred Schulder, whose pamphlet he printed). Here:

The Success of an Efficient Printer

SOME one sent us a copy of a house-organ that was several years old, and in it we found a marked article by David Gibson, in which he tells in his interesting style the story of Horace Carr, the Cleveland printer. It is worth reading:

Back in 1893, when we all had fresh bank failures every morning for breakfast, a printer in the old Herald job office in Cleveland, O., bought an old treadle press and a few fonts of type from a man who conducted a combination printing shop and candy store out in his neighborhood, which equipment he stored away in a room in his house.

A few weeks later when bank failures were about all anybody had for breakfast, this printer found himself out of a job.

He tried to find another, but the thought came to him very soon that it would be easier to find a few jobs of printing at which both he and the little outfit he had stored away could work.

This theory proved to be correct, and its occurring to him after he had been thrown out of employment is a very good illustration of why throwing out a man very frequently gives him a boost.

His first job was 20,000 counter slips for a neighboring grocery, and for which he agreed to accept provisions as payment.

Now, anybody who has ever been anywhere near a treadle press knows that 20,000 impressions, one at a time, is a whole lot. He didn't have enough rules to set the job three times--the capacity of his press--and he didn't feel justified in adding any more to his investment; but--

Where there is want there is a will.

He set the job once, made a mold by beating wet tissue backed with blotting paper down into the type with a hairbrush, held the mold tight to the type between a couple of scrap-steel plates by means of a couple of glue clamps, and baked the impression dry in the kitchen-stove oven.

Then he melted the contents of the hellbox in a soup ladle, cast three stereotype plates, and thus by a little headwork he cut his footwork in three.

The work following this consisted of billheads for job carpenters, business cards for clothes-wringer peddlers, and tickets for milkmen.

He was alive to the value of advertising as appealing to the habits and tendencies of the human mind; when he went out soliciting work he needed something to leave with those on whom he called--something to serve as a reminder.

So he set a line on a card:

Perfect Printing Punctually Performed Pleases Particular People!

He didn't have enough Ps: there were only six in the font in which he was compelled to set it for display, so he cut the seventh out of a block of maple wood.

Even with all his disadvantages, his work was good enough to impress the city librarian, and he was asked to figure on an annual report.

He got the job even though he was the third highest bidder, by agreeing to set in hand composition what the others proposed to do with a machine. Linotype composition in those days was not up to its present high state of perfection.

The job was too big for his imposing stone, to say nothing of his press, so he made it up on the kitchen table and farmed out the presswork.

With the profit on this job he bought more equipment, and a little later he moved downtown.

This man was Horace Carr.

He is today, perhaps, the foremost strictly type printer in America, and has done as much as any one man to revive this simple, beautiful art and commercially apply it to what would otherwise be the commonplace.

His influence has been felt not only directly through his own work, but by the published examples and exhibitions he has educated the younger printers to his tradition.

It was a big jump from being thrown out of a newspaper job office to his present position, but--

Many a man loses his opportunity by not losing his job.

An examination of some samples of his very early work, which includes some milk tickets, very clearly indicates the reason for his present position.

These early efforts indicate a simplicity, care and cleanliness beyond the same class of work at that time.

He took pains and at the expense of untold labor by reason of lack of common facilities. He used one job to study the next, and doubtless put more pride in his work than he got out in price.

His price may have been market, yet his quality was more than market.

While Horace Carr's plant is not large today, and his business is not large as compared with that of many printers, yet it is more than complete, and his patronage is unique.

It is not always well to measure a success with a tapeline; more frequently a micrometer will do.

His product is mostly small-edition work involving strictly type design.

He gets better than market prices for his work even though he may not get all that he thinks it is worth.

Few of us ever get what we think we are worth.

Horace Carr can actually express a personality or a business in type.

For instance, a letterhead for a millinery store would express the feminine in type selection and color scheme, in direct contrast to the boldness expressed in a letterhead for a machine shop.

The writer once saw a letterhead that he designed [p. 20] for a fashionable undertaker. You would have known that it was for one of that profession without reading it. The type selection had a suggestion of early religious printing, and the whole was done in purple and black to suggest mourning.

While Horace Carr's work has all been performed in Cleveland, yet his first real recognition came from abroad. Some samples of his work fell into the hands of the British Printer, one of the leading typographical journals of England.

And there is a good example in this for any man in any field of endeavor: A man may do good work in some place and get recognition for it another; a mechanic may do good work in one shop and get recognition for it in another; a man may do good work on one farm and get his reward on another.

A man should be efficient for his own sake, in his own selfish interest, rather than out of consideration for the man for whom he may be immediately working.

The efficient man can get a job anywhere; it becomes a selection of jobs rather than just a job.

An efficient man doesn't have to work under unjust conditions; he can go where the conditions are just.

The efficient man can be absolutely certain of the money return if he makes efficiency the first consideration.

--From The Success of an Efficient Printer, in The American Printer: A Semi-Monthly News, Business and Technical Journal 62.12 (June 20, 1916). 19-20.

Source

• Google Books: American Printer and Lithographer, Volume 62, pp. 17-18

I am happy to announce a new transcription now available over at the main Fair Use Repository site: a rare Anarchist pamphlet from Cleveland, in 1899, of Fred Schulder's essay, The Relation of Anarchism to Organization:

[. . .]

>

The theory of anarchism has a destructive, as well as a constructive side. It, being the doctrine of equal liberty, it is necessarily opposed to all that destroys this equal liberty, classing all such destructive agencies under the general term "government." This word has been defined by anarchists as invasion of the non-invasive individual’s liberty. In this sense, I must insist that the word be used in this discussion, for in this sense I shall use it: and if, in criticising my statements, you use the word in a different sense, you are not criticising the thought expressed by me, but only a thing of your own manufacture.

It may be claimed, however, that government, even in this sense, is but imperfectly defined until we know what does, and what does not, constitute invasion of equal liberty in every imaginable case. I concede that a difficulty exists here—that the line cannot be quite definitely drawn. But pray, have those who thus object, a remedy to offer? Have their courts of justice (?) ever discovered the true line? Have they ever discovered what, as an argument against a social theory, is claimed to be undiscoverable? Or, have they not, on the contrary, perpetrated invasions of equal liberty so gross that even the dullest mind must perceive it and cry out in disgust? Under liberty, however, this difficulty will continue to grow less; men will ever more realize their mutual dependence, and this must increase with the development of the social organism. And realizing this mutual dependence, they will adjust these minor differences according to their intelligence—an adjustment which government often prevents.

Now let us get back to the main point: anarchism is necessarily opposed to all government; the state is essentially governmental (that is to say, invasive), not only in its reaction on other organisms, but also in the forming of its own organization; it invades the liberty of its own members. What the anarchist objects to in the state is not the element of organization but the element of government.

Take the element of government out of the state, and no anarchist will object to the remains.

Since organization vastly increases the strength and efficiency of that which is organized, the anarchist sees in organized government—that is, organized invasion—the most effective and the most dangerous kind of invasion. The doctrine of equal liberty necessarily implying the unconditional self-ownership of the individual, it logically follows that it implies, also, the ownership of his product. The taking of the producer’s product without his consent is described by the anarchist as robbery. Hence anarchism is opposed to robbery—to all robbery. And again it finds in organized robbery the most effective form. Through the instrumentality of the state some individuals acquire a monopoly of opportunities, some of which are absolutely necessary to the production of wealth, and others very helpful to it. Such opportunities are freedom to the use of land, the freedom of trade, the freedom to use any medium of exchange which will be accepted, the freedom to invent or to copy, etc.,—monopolies which are unthinkable in absence of government, and which enable their holders to extract from the producer, as a tribute for allowing him to utilize whatever is so monopolized, such a portion of his product as is equaled by the benefits derived from this utilization. Now, since the monopolization of natural opportunities is based on invasion of equal freedom—on government,—its necessary economic result, the exaction of this tribute, (which, I believe, I am safe in saying, constitutes the greater part of the whole product) is also based on government.

Such is the fruit of organized robbery. And again, anarchism is opposed, not to the organization, but to the robbery. Although, of course, without the robbery, the organization would be without purpose in this instance, and consequently would not exist.

Having seen that anarchism is not opposed to organization itself, let us now go a little further and see if it does not in some cases indirectly further organization, by opposing that which tends to prevent or retard this organization. Since organization, as we have seen, is the life-principle of all aggregation or association, it is obvious that it would take place naturally wherever the individuals composing an association found it mutually advantageous. And it would take place as rapidly as they fuond it to be to their mutual advantage, provided this organization were not opposed by other forces. All such opposition must necessarily be in the nature of invasion of liberty; such opposition must be government. Anarchism then, by opposing government, would indirectly further such organization.

Instances of government opposing organization are numerous. Let us take society in general. There is a natural tendency for people to shift about, until they finally settle where they find surroundings to which they are best adapted. This tendency is being interfered with by organized government—the state—through emigration and immigration laws. In thickly-populated parts of the earth we find government prohibiting emigration, while in relatively thinly-populated countries the same force is directed against immigration.

In the industrial organism, government interference is so obvious that it is needless to point out any particular case. Wherever we turn, we find ourselves confronted by tariffs, patents, copyrights, licenses, and numerous other legislation. While these laws effectually rob the producer, they also retard industrial organization. For in the absence of these interferences, under free competition, each, after taking into account the economic demand and natural opportunities, would take to such employment as would be best fitted to his peculiar abilities. This he does now, after taking into account also the tax, fine, or (as I should call it) the robbery, which is attached to the consumption of some products, and which tends to disturb the demand. Now, if this legislation remained unchanged, the adaptation would at last become perfect, and although the producer would still be robbed, the organization of industry would not be retarded. But on account of the constant fighting among the robbers for the plunder, and through other causes, this legislation is ever changing, and the energy, which under freedom, would be used for further organization, is wasted in re-adaptation to changed interfering agencies. Hence, such legislation retards industrial organization; and anarchism, since it opposes government, both organized and unorganized, indirectly furthers social and industrial organization.

[. . .]

>

--From Fred Schulder, The Relation of Anarchism to Organization (1899; Cleveland, Horace E. Carr)

Schulder (1874-1961) was a anarchist writer, speaker, and sometime traveling salesman -- during 1907-1908, he made a living travelling throughout America selling books from Benjamin Tucker's publishing house and subscriptions to Liberty. He had a conscience marriage with fellow anarchist writer Adeline Champney; their son, Horace Champney, was an anti-war radical involved with A Quaker Action Group, who sailed a boat full of medical supplies to North Vietnam during the American War. James J. Martin described this pamphlet by Schulder in the context of the younger generation of individualists trying to build on the work of Tucker and the Liberty circle: Others attempted the task assumed by [William] Bailie in reconciling the many elements which went to make up individualist anarchism from the combined influence of Spencerian and Stirnerite doctrines. One of these projected syntheses was the brief outline of Fred Schulder, The Relation of Anarchism to Organization. Another was Francis D. Tandy, an associate of Cohen in Denver, whose Modern Social Tendencies and Voluntary Socialism were anarchist works of considerable repute, showing influence of Tucker, Spencer and Thoreau. Both Tandy and Schulder were recipients of Tucker's approval in their activities along the program of educational propaganda for the anarchist cause (Men Against the State [1970/2009], p. 258). (Tucker may well have approved of Schulder's efforts, on the whole, but the reaction to the pamphlet in Liberty ["On Picket Duty," XIII.12, p. 1] was to make fun of the typesetting. Having read the original, I can say that this was an accurate enough complaint; but perhaps not entirely to the point.) Schulder's essay is, in any case, an interesting attempt at discussing the possibilities of consensual social organization, and the anti-social, anti-coordinative features of State force, from a framework based on Spencerian evolutionary theory.