… big thinkers like Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Ayn Rand, and the like …

May I suggest that Thomas Jefferson be excluded from consideration, along with any other so-called “liberal” or “libertarian” who unrepentantly presumed to dominate his fellow human beings and force them into an abject condition of chattel slavery?

As for genuinely libertarian heroes, off the top of my head, I’d like to recommend Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Sarah Moore Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Ezra Heywood, Angela Tilton Heywood, Benjamin Tucker, William Graham Sumner, Mark Twain, Dyer Lum, Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Randolph Bourne, Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Samuel E. Konkin III.

For what it’s worth, to-day is the 200th birthday of Lysander Spooner, one of America’s foremost radical libertarian heroes.

Steev,

Well, you can use a word to mean whatever you want it to mean, but if you hope to be understood by other people, your meaning should probably have some kind of connection with the way that other people have historically used the word.

The original “Progressives” — Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, etc. — were well aware of American anarchists, and they despised them. In fact, in the run-up to World War I, those with influence in the media blacklisted anarchists (such as Randolph Bourne) from publishing their writing, and during and after World War I, those with political power (such as Woodrow Wilson) had thousands of American anarchists (such as Emma Goldman) beaten, arrested, jailed, prosecuted, and/or exiled from the country.

I see no reason why anarchists should want to associate ourselves with a historical movement that has done everything in its power to hinder or destroy us.