Clarence Lee Swartz

{{Short description|American anarchist (1868–1936)}}

File:Clarence Lee Swartz.jpg
(1 January 1900)]]

Clarence Lee Swartz (1868–1936) was an American individualist anarchist, whose best-known work, What is Mutualism? (1927) is a book explaining the economic system of mutualism.

{{Libertarianism US|intellectuals}}

Swartz was a friend of Benjamin Tucker and frequent contributor of signed and unsigned editorials to Tucker's newspaper Liberty.Vanguard Press (1926), "Publisher's Note," in Individual Liberty: Selections from the Writings of Benjamin R. Tucker, edited by C.L.S. New York: Vanguard Press. In addition, he worked for a series of anarchist newspapers and journals. He worked in the mechanical department of Liberty beginning in 1891,Vanguard Press (1926), "Publisher's Note," in Individual Liberty: Selections from the Writings of Benjamin R. Tucker, edited by C.L.S. New York: Vanguard Press. edited an anarchist journal called Voice of the People{{Cite book |last1=Sears |first1=Hal D. |title=The Sex Radicals: Free Love in High Victorian America |date=1977 |url=http://archive.org/details/sexradicalsfreel0000sear |language=en |isbn=978-0-7006-0148-6 |publisher=Regents Press of Kansas |p=[https://archive.org/details/sexradicalsfreel0000sear/page/145/mode/1up 145] }} and served as assistant editor for Moses Harman's journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer in 1890.James J. Martin (1970/2009), Men Against the State. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute. 258. Swartz was arrested in Kansas City, Missouri for distributing a newspaper called Sunday Sun in 1891. The charges were dropped when the prosecutor failed to show in court. He published two individualist anarchist periodicals at the turn of the century, I (beginning in 1898) and The Free Comrade (beginning in 1900).James J. Martin (1970/2009), Men Against the State. Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute. 258. In 1908, Tucker's publishing business, including most of his books and plates, were destroyed in a fire and after Tucker retired from publishing and moved to Europe, "practically all of the literature of individualist anarchism [went] out of print".C.L.S. (1926), "Editor's Foreword," in Individual Liberty: Selections from the Writings of Benjamin R. Tucker, edited by C.L.S. New York: Vanguard Press.

Swartz made efforts throughout the 1920s to revive the individualist literature. He prepared and edited Individual Liberty: Selections from the Writings of Benjamin R. Tucker (New York: Vanguard Press), a collection of excerpts from Tucker's writing in Liberty, which was the first collection of Tucker's writing since Tucker's own collection Instead of a Book. In 1923 he worked together with Charles T. Sprading and J. William Lloyd on The Libertarian, a magazine opposed to blue laws, Prohibition and the censorship of arts and entertainment.[http://fair-use.org/the-libertarian/1923/Q03/ The Libertarian: An ANTI-BLUE-LAW MAGAZINE, Vol. I, No. 1] (Third Quarter, 1923).