Scott Nearing (August 6, 1883 – August 24, 1983) was an American radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, pacifist, vegetarian and advocate of simple living. In 1915, he was dismissed from a teaching position at the Wharton School on account of his left-wing politics, becoming a cause célèbre of the American Left. His opposition to American entry into World War I led to his prosecution under the Espionage Act, for which he was found not guilty. After the war, he became a leading leftist intellectual associated with the Socialist Party of America, and later with the Communist Party USA. From the Great Depression until the end of his life, Nearing and his wife Helen lived a self-sufficient homesteading lifestyle. Together, they published Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World in 1954.
Early years Nearing was born in Morris Run, Tioga County, Pennsylvania, the heart of the state's coal country. Nearing's grandfather, Winfield Scott Nearing, had arrived in Tioga County with his family in 1864, at the age of 35, when he accepted a job as a civil and mining engineer. Before the end of the year he had assumed full control of mining operations as the superintendent of the Morris Run Coal Company, a position of authority which he held for the remainder of his working life.John A. Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing: An Intellectual Biography. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991; p. 7. An intense, driven man, Scott Nearing's grandfather studied science and nature, practiced gardening and carpentry, and regularly received crates of books from New York City, amassing a large personal library.Stephen J. Whitfield, Scott Nearing: Apostle of American Radicalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974; pp. 3–5. In his memoirs written late in his life, Scott Nearing would recall his grandfather as one of the four most influential figures in his life.Scott Nearing, The Making of a Radical: A Political Autobiography. New York: Harper and Row, 1972; p. 29. Nearing's upbringing was that of a young bourgeois, his mother employing a part-time tutor and two Polish servants to clean the gleaming white house atop a hill overlooking the town.Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 6. Nearing had three sisters and two brothers. Scott's brother Guy recalled that the citizens of Morris Run had treated the handsome and intelligent Scott "the way they would treat the heir to the nobleman. ... They all treated him with awe."
Nearing's father was a small businessman and stockbroker, his mother a vigorous, energetic, and idealistic woman whom Nearing later credited with instilling in him an appreciation for the higher things in life: nature, books, and the arts.Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing, p. 8. Despite an upbringing in a life of privilege made possible in no small measure by the harsh anti-union policies of his patriarchal grandfather,Historian Stephen J. Whitfield describes Winfield Scott Nearing as "imperious and remorseless to his employees" and details the way in which the company drove out strikers from their company-owned homes during a strike in the winter of 1873. Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 3. young Scott nevertheless developed a social conscience, which one of his biographers describes as "a burr under his skin that none of his relatives acquired and that no interpretation satisfactorily explains."
Nearing graduated from high school in 1901 and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania Law School, "where corporate bias so violated his idealism that after one year he quit."Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 7. Instead, he studied oratory at Temple University in Philadelphia and enrolled at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he immersed himself in the emerging science of economics. At the Wharton School, Nearing was deeply influenced by Simon Nelson Patten, an innovative and unconventional educator and founding father of the American Economic Association.Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 8. Nearing distinguished himself as a "Wharton man" during the progressive era, one of the proverbial "best and brightest" trained in practical economics to be readied for a place as a responsible leader of the community.Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing, p. 18. In the words of another of his students, Patten taught innovative thinking—"making use of creative intelligence to master new situations irrespective of received dogma."Rexford Tugwell, cited in Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing, p. 18. Nearing seems to have found these new intellectual tools for potential social change to be exciting and liberating. He completed his undergraduate program in just three years, while simultaneously engaging in campus politics and competitive debate.
Career
Nearing received his BS degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1905 and his PhD in economics in 1909. From 1905 to 1907, he served as the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee, a volunteer society working to solve the child labor problem in the state.Scott Nearing, The Trial of Scott Nearing and the American Socialist Society: United States District Court for the Southern District of New York City, February 5 to 19, 1919. New York: Rand School of Social Science, 1919; p. 26.
Wharton School From 1908 until 1915 while living in Arden, Delaware, Nearing taught economics and sociology at the Wharton School of Business and at Swarthmore College, authoring a stream of books on economics and social problems.Nearing, The Trial of Scott Nearing and the American Socialist Society, p. 26. Nearing was a staunch advocate of a "new economics," which insisted that ... economists part company with the ominous pictures of an overpopulated, starving world, prostrate before the throne of "competition," "individual initiative," "private property," or some other pseudo-god, and tell men in simple, straightforward language how they may combine, re-shape, or overcome the laws and utilize them as a blessing instead of enduring them as a burden and a curse.Scott Nearing, Social Sanity: A Preface to the Book of Social Progress. New York: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1913; pp. 70–71. Cited in Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing, p. 28. Much as Karl Marx drew radical implications from the ideas of the conservative Hegel, Nearing took the economic logic of his department head, Simon Patten, and made radical inferences about wealth and the distribution of income that his mentor had hesitated to draw.Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing, p. 31. Nearing believed that unfettered wealth stifled initiative and impeded economic advancement, and hoped that progressive thinkers among the ownership class would come to realize the negative impact of economic parasitism and accept their civic duty of enlightened leadership.Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing, p. 36. He outlined an economic republicanism based on "four basic democratic concepts—equality of opportunity, civic obligation, popular government, and human rights."Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing, p. 38.
While living in Arden in 1910, Nearing learned about The Landlord's Game, the forerunner of Monopoly, and taught it to his students. This use of the game as an instructional device led to its spread among colleges.
But Nearing's aggressive social activism in the classroom, through the printed word, and through public speaking brought him into conflict with his employers at the Wharton School of Business, resulting in his dismissal and his emergence as a cause célèbre of the American radical movement during the next decade. On the morning of June 16, 1915, Nearing's secretary telephoned him to report that a letter from the provost had arrived, saying that "as the term of your appointment as assistant professor of economics for 1914–1915 is about to expire, I am directed by the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania to inform you that it will not be renewed."Quoted in Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 25. Penn's board of trustees was heavily stacked with bankers, corporation lawyers, financiers, and corporation executives, and Nearing's writing had not gone unnoticed.The 1915 Board included banker Effingham Morris; corporation lawyers George Wharton Pepper and J. Levering Jones; E.T. Stotesbury of J.P. Morgan & Co.; and Randal Morgan, an executive with the United Gas Improvement Company. Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 26. His tenuous situation had been exacerbated by an open letter to The North American in which he challenged the right wing evangelist Billy Sunday to apply the Gospel to the conditions of industrial capitalism, including "the railroad interests ... the traction company ... the manufacturers ... the vested interests."Quoted in Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 6. In this oral history recorded shortly before his death, Nearing concluded that it was "his speeches on behalf of child labor legislation" which cost him his job at Wharton. The story he heard was that the Pennsylvania State Manufacturers Association, which did not want child labor outlawed, had pressured Pennsylvania state legislators who in turn pressured the university to remove Nearing.
Reaction to Nearing's dismissal from the academy was swift, with department head Patten and others issuing statements condemning the decision. Progressives in the Wharton School compiled a summary of the facts of the case and sent it to 1500 newspapers, journals, and academics around the country.Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 36. Even conservatives on the faculty were worried since, as one Wharton professor observed, "the moment Nearing went, any conservative statement became but the spoken word of a 'kept' professor." Conversely, some radicals felt vindicated in their belief in the conservative nature of the American academy. Socialist writer Upton Sinclair told Nearing in an open letter that "You do not belong in a university. You belong with us Socialists and free lances . ... Instead of addressing small numbers of college boys, you will be able to address large audiences of men."Quoted in Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 40. Nearing's dismissal was retrospectively called by one historian "the most famous breach of academic freedom" of the era.Quoted in Whitfield, Scott Nearing, p. 43.
First World War
From the fall of 1915, Nearing was established as a radical "public man." He joined the American Union Against Militarism in 1916 and delivered a series of speeches condemning the "Preparedness" campaign then being promoted by Woodrow Wilson and the nation's political elite.Nearing, The Trial of Scott Nearing and the American Socialist Society, pp. 33, 102. He also remained a university professor, teaching Social Science at the city-owned Toledo University from 1915 through 1917. The intense nationalistic feeling that swept the country now that America was embroiled at last in the war in Europe spelled the end of Nearing's Toledo days, as he later recalled in his memoirs: Al Miller, Chairman of the Toledo Forum, asked me to come to his office. He greeted me pleasantly and then said, "As you know, I am attorney for the Toledo Chamber of Commerce, on a permanent retainer. I am their legal spokesman; they are among my clients. They have directed me to introduce a resolution at the next meeting of the Toledo university trustees, ending your connection with the institution." He waited a moment for this announcement to sink in.
"Of course," I said quietly. "That is one of the symptoms of war fever. Those who tell the truth or try to tell the truth are among the first victims of any war."
Al hurried on, "You understand, there is nothing personal about this. You and I have worked together on the Forum and other projects with never a real disagreement, certainly never a fight."
"That is true," I said, "and I think our joint efforts have helped to make some real advances here in Toledo."