Early U.S. Anarchist Stickers
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In the United States, some of the earliest political stickers date to the early 1900s when anarchists Benjamin Tucker and Steven T. Byington urged writers to embellish letters sent through the mail with small, text-based gummed labels in forty-eight different designs. Quotes included “Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse,” “If there were more extremists in evolutionary periods, there would be no revolutionary periods,” and “What I must not do, the Government must not do.” Advertised in Tucker’s journal Liberty in April 1904 and May 1905, the stickers were described as:
“aggressive, concise Anarchist assertions and arguments, in sheets, gummed and perforated, to be planted everywhere as broadcast seed for thought. ”
In 1904, Liberty also included a letter to the editor from Byington titled “The Theory of Stickers,” in which the author stated that he had “not yet thought of a more economical and telling way to keep ourselves before the public than by an explicitly-worded sticker.
Julie Herrada, curator of the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, discusses these early anarchist stickers in her review of All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement by Carlotta Anderson. In April 1908, Labadie began affixing anarchist stickers onto letters before mailing. They were not the simplified circle-A symbol, but small printed quotations attributed to respected authors such as George Bernard Shaw and LaoTze.
A Detroit Post Office inspector eventually took notice of the stickers, deeming their sentiments “bloodthirsty” and therefore unmailable. Labadie promptly protested the ruling. The Detroit Journal accused postal authorities of censorship, framing the issue as an infringement on free expression rather than a matter of postal regulation. Under public scrutiny, the inspector relented, and the mailings were permitted to continue. Rather than suppressing anarchist expression, the controversy amplified it and gave Detroit anarchists even greater public visibility. The episode stands as one of the earliest documented uses of stickers as political propaganda in U.S. history.
Benjamin R. Tucker, “Anarchist Stickers,” Liberty XIV, no. 20 (April 1904): 7, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/14-20.pdf; Tucker, Liberty XIV, no. 26 (May 1905), 7, https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/anarchy_and_privacy_control/Liberty_(1881-1908)/Liberty_14-26.pdf.
Steven S. Byington, “The Theory of Stickers,” Liberty XIV, no. 20 (April 1904): 7, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/14-20.pdf.
Julie Herrada, “Joseph Labadie and the Labor Movement: Life of a Detroit Anarchist,” Fifth Estate 353, Summer 1999, https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/353-summer-1999/joseph-labadie-and-the-labor-movement/.
Carlotta Andersson, All-American Anarchist, Wayne State University Press, 2017, 204-206.