Clarence Lee Swartz

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.

Swartz was a friend of Benjamin Tucker and frequent contributor of signed and unsigned editorials to Tucker's newspaper Liberty.^[1] In addition, he worked for a series of anarchist newspapers and journals. He worked in the mechanical department of Liberty beginning in 1891,^[2] edited an anarchist journal called Voice of the People^[3] and served as assistant editor for Moses Harman's journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer in 1890.^[4] 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).^[5] 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".^[6]

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.^[7]