An Affair to Remember, continued

In his autobiographical book The Making of a Radical, Nearing recalled how Wharton Dean James T. Young called him into his office and said: “Mr. Nearing, if I were in your place I would do a little less public speaking about child labor.” Nearing, who served as secretary of the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee, believed that the “child who is working is not developing intellectually, may be degraded morally, and is apt to be stunted physically.” The low wages paid to workers, he argued, forced families to send their children into the factories and mines.

As Young’s warning suggested, Nearing was making enemies. Prominent alumni had been complaining to the editor of the Alumni Register, Horace Mather Lippincott C1897, who wrote that members of the teaching profession, especially those dealing with “economic, financial, statistical, or legal principles which underlay the practice of government, should carefully avoid a participation in exciting or controversial questions of the moment.

“Morally, the man who joins an institution thereby relinquishes his right to complete freedom of speech,” the Register added, and he should resign rather than “embarrass the management of the institution.”

Provost Smith, who was not keen on “academic people meddling in political questions,” had already set the tone.

“Suppose, for illustration, that I, as a chemist, should discover that some slaughtering company was putting formalin in its sausage,” Smith once said; “now surely that would be none of my business.”

Nearing saw his role differently. “Either the teacher is a hireling of the established order, who is receiving a fee to act as its apologist or champion, or else the teacher is a servant of the community and as such is bound to take whatever stand the exigencies of his position demand.”

In late 1913, three academic organizations—the American Economics Association, the American Sociological Society, and the American Political Science Association—adopted identical resolutions supporting the principles of “liberty of thought, freedom of speech, and security of tenure.” That led to a Joint Committee on Academic Freedom, which in turn led to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)—whose first members included Nearing, Patten, Young, and Roswell McCrea, the new Wharton dean. According to the Philadelphia North American, the “direct cause” for the resolutions was the “efforts of reactionary trustees of the University of Pennsylvania to inaugurate a systematic elimination of progressive teachers.”

“I do not believe in muzzling any member of the faculty,” responded Provost Smith. “I do believe, however, that no man may go too far.”

Amid rumors that Nearing might be dismissed, McCrea said: “There is no question about the open hostility toward Dr. Nearing … on the part of certain interests.”

Chief among those interests was, apparently, Joseph Grundy, a Bucks County wool manufacturer and politician who served as president of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers Association and later became a U.S. senator. He strongly opposed any child-labor legislation, and had repeatedly crossed swords with Nearing. Given his prominence in the state legislature, which was approving increasingly large appropriations for the financially strapped University, Grundy was a force to be reckoned with.

Yet Nearing openly flirted with danger. In one of his economics classes devoted to the theory of consumption, he pinned a newspaper account of a lavish high-society dinner given by Mrs. E. T. Stotesbury of Philadelphia to the bulletin board and wrote the words Sin and Social Salvation on the blackboard. Not only was Stotesbury’s husband a wealthy trustee of the University, but her son, the late James H. Cromwell W’19, was a student—and was sitting in that class. It was an outrageous—even cruel—act, and it prompted a number of alumni to protest Nearing’s “inquisitorial examinations into the social conditions surrounding the homes and families of the students.” And yet, according to Saltmarsh, the students themselves (with the presumable exception of Cromwell), “broke into a prolonged ovation at the end of the class.”

Although the trustees voted by a nine-to-five vote in 1914 to promote Nearing to assistant professor, they also sent copies of a new bylaw warning him and other assistant professors that their appointments were for one year only. One trustee explained that Nearing’s promotion was intended to be “an appointment on probation.”

If Nearing was concerned about his status, he didn’t show it. He wrote a fiery open letter (printed in local newspapers) to a business-friendly evangelical minister named Billy Sunday, who was believed to have been brought to Philadelphia to help avert a transit strike. The “most sinister crimes against the ideals of Christ’s religion are committed by the system of industry for profit,” which paid “hideously low” wages, wrote Nearing—who then invited Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, to campus. When Provost Smith refused to allow the student Civic Club to use any University facilities for Gompers’ address, the infuriated students formed a Free Speech Club and rented a hall off-campus—only to find that their posters announcing the lecture had been torn down. Nearing took his classes off-campus to hear the talk anyway.

A few months later he supported the re-formation of a campus chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He also contributed articles to the International Socialist Review with titles like “The Parasitic Power of Property” and “The Impending Conflict.”

In the late spring, Effingham B. Morris, a trustee and president of the Girard Trust Company, personally told Nearing that there would be “no eliminations from the University faculty.” But, he added: “We will give you young fellows plenty of rope. You will hang yourselves.”

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