Warren Chase

Warren Chase (January 5, 1813 – February 25, 1891) was an American social reformer, politician, farmer, and pioneer of Wisconsin and California. He was also a significant figure in the American Spiritualist movement. He was the founder of the Utopian experimental community known as the "Wisconsin Phalanx"—now part of Ripon, Wisconsin—and helped found the school now known as Ripon College. He was one of only three people to serve as a delegate to both of Wisconsin's constitutional conventions, where he fought successfully for the legal right of married women to own property. He served terms in the Wisconsin Senate and the California Senate.

Politically, Chase favored radical social reforms and pursued it through multiple different political parties and movements. Originally a Democrat, he left the party over slavery and joined the Free Soil Party, then continued with the abolitionist cause and became a Republican. In the 1870s, disapproving of the excesses of the Republicans, Chase became a Liberal Republican, then joined the populist Greenback Party. During those Greenback years, he was also active with the Workingmen's Party of California. He wrote two autobiographical works, called The Life-Line of the Lone One: Or, Autobiography of the World's Child and Forty Years on the Spiritual Rostrum.

Early life and education Chase was born in Pittsfield, New Hampshire, on January 5, 1813. He was the son of Susanna Durgin, who was unmarried at the time. His mother was maligned by the community and expelled from the church for giving birth out of wedlock, making it difficult to provide for herself and Warren. Warren's father was Simon Chase, who was married to Huldah Peaslee. Simon Chase fought in the War of 1812 and died at Plattsburgh in the fall of 1814, when Warren was not yet two years old. His mother died only a few years later, when Warren was five.

As a child, Warren lived briefly with a Quaker family near Catamount Mountain. But after his mother's death, he became a ward of David Fogg and his family. Warren later described this time as a miserable experience and compared his servitude to slavery. He did not receive an education with the Fogg family, and at age fourteen was still not able to read or write. It was at that age he ran away to his grandmother's home in Pittsfield. Warren's grandmother and other members of the community interceded on his behalf and he was transferred to the care of his paternal grandfather, Nathaniel Chase, where he received a proper education and upbringing. Convinced of the applicability of Fourier's "Associationist" prescription, Chase committed himself to the emerging movement without reservation, organizing a series of preliminary meetings to draft a constitution for a local "phalanx." In 1849, he was the candidate of the newly organized Free Soil Party for Governor of Wisconsin, coming in third behind Democratic incumbent Nelson Dewey and Whig Alexander L. Collins.

After Wisconsin

After the dissolution of the Wisconsin Phalanx, he moved to Michigan in 1853, then to Missouri, where he was elected as a Presidential elector for Horace Greeley in the 1872 United States presidential election.

In 1876 he moved to California and settled in Santa Barbara, where he worked as editor of the Independent. While in California he was elected to the California State Senate on the Workingmen's Party ticket, serving from 1880 to 1883. In 1880, he was a candidate for Senate President Pro Tempore, losing to Republican George F. Baker by a margin of 15 to 22. In 1882, he ran for Congress as a Greenbacker.

Chase was a supporter of free silver, anti-monopolism, and Chinese exclusion, although on the latter point he condemned racial violence like the San Francisco riot of 1877. When the California State Legislature convened in 1881 to elect a U.S. Senator, Chase nominated economist and newspaper publisher Henry George. In his nomination speech, Chase eulogized George as follows:

George only received two votes out of 40 cast in the State Senate; one from Chase, and the other from fellow Workingmen's Senator Joseph C. Gorman.

Death Warren Chase died in Cobden, Illinois, in 1891, and was buried at Cobden Cemetery.

Electoral history Wisconsin Governor (1849)

Published works