Benjamin Tucker was America's chief exponent of individualist anarchism, he was instrumental in bringing the ideas of Proudhon, Bakunin, Stirner, and other anarchists and near-anarchists before an inquisitive readership. His principal achievement was the publication of his journal Liberty, the best anarchist periodical in the English language, as Joseph Ishill rightly judged it. Unlike Alexander Berkman, whose Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist has become a classic, Tucker had no great book smoldering inside him. Nor, in contrast to Emma Goldman or Johann Most, did he acquire a reputation as a speaker. (He held forth, on the contrary, only when the occasion demanded it, being "never as ill at ease," he confessed, as when standing on his feet before an audience.)

But Tucker was an accomplished translator, whose renderings of Proudhon and Bakunin (to say nothing of Victor Hugo, Chernyshevsky, and Tolstoy) alone have earned him a place in the anarchist pantheon. More than that, he was a first-rate editor and writer, one of the finest journalists American radicalism has produced. Of Liberty he had particular cause to be proud. It was meticulously designed and edited, with brilliant galaxy of contributors, not least among them Tucker himself. Its debut in 1881 was a milestone in the history of the anarchist movement, and it won an audience wherever English was read. As a publisher, moreover, Tucker issued a steady stream of books and pamphlets on anarchism and related subjects over a period of nearly thirty years.

We are willing to hazard the judgment that coming history will yet place him in the very front ranks of the world's great social saviours. The grand head and face speak for themselves regarding the immense energy, lofty character, and innate nobility of the man. We should have esteemed it among the chief honors of our life to have known him personally, and should account it a great piece of good fortune to talk with one who was personally intimate with him and the essence and full meaning of his thought and aspiration.

In New York he (Benjamin Tucker) lived pleasantly, though not lavishly, in a two-room hotel suite. Another reason he decided to go to France was that he and the family could live rather well there on his income. My parents, incidentally, were never legally married. Yet they were the most monogamistic couple I ever saw, absolutely devoted to each other until the end. Oddly enough, they believed in having separate rooms and, if one had the means, even separate houses, coming together when you wanted to. They couldn't afford that though! I always liked the idea of my husband coming home at night and not having to plan and make a date to see him!

We lived in Le Vésinet the first six years, traveling a good deal. The winter following the outbreak of the war we stayed with Henry Bool in England, and when we returned to France we moved to an apartment in Nice. We stayed there eleven years. But taxes were rising sharply in France, so we moved to Monaco, where we rented a nice house for thirteen years, and where Father died in 1939.

During the war, Father was anti-German from thee start. The German government, German militarism, German regimentation - he hated them with a passion. And he loved France. France was the only thing that counted - French food, French wine, French newspapers and books. He wanted to be buried there.

He never came back to the United States, and never wished to. He didn't speak French very well, but he read it easily. He had a great admiration for Clemenceau, to whom he bore a close physical resemblance.

After the war, Father was afraid of trouble. He was afraid, as a foreigner, of being disturbed. He wanted to be left alone. There was no contact with Emma Goldman or Alexander Berkman, who were living in southern France. Father disliked both of them. Mother had been friends with Emma Goldman in New York, and once she saw them on the street in Nice but decided not to approach them. John Henry Mackay, used to come down, and George Bernard Shaw came once for afternoon tea...

Father's attitude towards communism never changed one whit, nor about religion. He was very consistent all his life. In his last months he called in the French housekeeper. "I want her," he said, "to be witness that on my death bed I'm not recanting. I do not believe in God!" I was interested, even sympathetic, in his ideas. But I was never really an anarchist. I don't think it would ever work. Neither did Father at the end. He was very pessimistic about the world and in his political outlook. But he was always optimistic about himself, always cheerful, happy; he never sat and brooded, but was content to look out at the view and at his books. He sang hymns from Sunday School - the Rock of Ages and that sort of thing - and couldn't keep a tune. He had a reputation as a cold person. But how he loved Mother! And he cried easily at anything noble.