Bolton Hall (activist)

Bolton Hall (August 5, 1854 – December 10, 1938) was an American lawyer, author, and Georgist activist who worked on behalf of the poor and starting the back-to-the-land movement in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century.

Hall was active on behalf of various progressive movements. He was an admirer of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, French politician, philosopher and socialist, of Benjamin R. Tucker, editor and publisher of the individualist anarchist periodical Liberty, and Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist, pacifist and Christian anarchist. He was opposed to Marxism and agreed with classical liberal political theorist Herbert Spencer, who called it "the coming slavery."

Hall was an early leader of the American Longshoremen's Union in New York City, established with the help of British socialist and trade unionist Tom Mann as part of a cross-Atlantic organizing drive for all maritime workers. In 1898, serving as general treasurer of that labor organization, he drew condemnation from delegates to New York City's Central Labor Union because he submitted a motion to oppose opening a Spanish–American War inasmuch as the latter country had agreed to arbitration in the Havana, Cuba, sinking of the battleship Maine. The motion lost by a small margin.

Before 1908 he established the Vacant Lot Gardening Association in New York City, which grew to "about 200 members" who "conducted a number of experiments in and near New York during its existence." One of them included the use of thirty acres of land on Bronxdale Avenue, near White Plains Road, "which the Astor estate had allowed us to use and on which a number of families had been living." Afterward, the association used property on Dyckman Street near Prescott Avenue, not for cultivation, but for the establishment of a tent city. The difficulty in getting free land for "vacant lot gardening" led Hall to establish the Little Land League, whose idea was to buy property no more than 90 minutes from New York for a training school, "and the people who have proved capable there we shall put on their feet as farmers on a larger piece of land further away." In 1909 he made a trip to Europe to study vacant-lot gardening.

...
Wikipedia