Edward Atkinson (activist)

Edward Atkinson (February 10, 1827 – December 11, 1905) was an economist and a founder of the American Anti-Imperialist League.

He was born in Brookline, Massachusetts and educated in private schools. He received a Ph.D. from Dartmouth College and an LL.D. from the University of South Carolina. In the decade before the Civil War, Atkinson was a successful entrepreneur as an executive of some of the leading cotton mills of New England. Later, he was President of Boston Manufacturers Mutual Insurance Company and the Mutual Boiler Insurance Company of Boston. He invented an improved kitchen stove known as the “Aladdin cooker.”

He also fought against slavery by supporting the Free-Soil Party and a Boston committee to aid escaped slaves. Growing weary of compromise, he began raising money to pay for rifles and ammunition to support the insurgent guerrilla force of John Brown. In 1866, he was chosen a delegate to the national union convention held in Philadelphia, but he took no part in its deliberations. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1879.

He was inspired by the ideas of Adam Smith, Richard Cobden, and John Bright, and he became a leading publicist for free trade. In many ways, he can be described as the American counterpart to Frédéric Bastiat. He spoke out against the inflationist ideas of William Jennings Bryan and others but, unlike some, favored the total denationalization or privatization of money.

He campaigned for Grover Cleveland and participated in the formation of the Clevelandite National Democratic Party (United States) third party in 1896. Atkinson was appalled by the colonialist and imperialist policies of the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations in the wake of the Spanish–American War. He reacted by becoming a full-time activist in the American Anti-Imperialist League. As a vice president of that organization, Atkinson wrote to the United States Department of War for a list of soldiers serving in the Philippines so that he might send them his privately published pamphlets. Failing to receive a reply, Atkinson announced to the press that he was sending copies to Generals Lawton, Miller, and Otis, Admiral Dewey, correspondent J. F. Bass, and to Jacob Shurman and Dean Worcestrer on the Philippine Commission.

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