An Affair to Remember, continued

Nearing’s career never recovered. Though he was hired the following year by Toledo University as professor of political science and dean of its College of Arts and Sciences, he soon sparked a furor by opposing American entry into the Great War—and by saying that “the phrase ‘freedom and justice for all,’ as recited by the innocent children,” was “humbug.” In March 1917, the Toledo trustees voted by a close margin to dismiss him.

That was the year of the Russian Revolution, and after Nearing joined the leftist People’s Council for Democracy and Peace, a Justice Department infiltrator described him as “very popular and DANGEROUS for he is looked to as being very wise.” He ran for Congress as the Socialist Party’s candidate from New York in 1918—he was known affectionately as “the professor,” and would often use a folding blackboard to make his points—but was defeated by Fiorello LaGuardia. That same year he was indicted for having written a pamphlet titled The Great Madness, which federal officials described as “clearly a violation of the Espionage Law, being a frank description of the war as a capitalist scheme.” After he delivered a riveting closing argument on his own behalf, a jury found him not guilty—though it did find the American Socialist Society guilty of publishing the pamphlet.

Nearing joined the Communist Party in 1927, but lasted less than three years before simultaneously resigning and getting expelled for his “non-Marxian conceptions.” It was, he noted, his “last institutional connection.” From there, he went back to the land, first in Vermont, then in Maine—Living the Good Life, as he and his wife Helen put it.

In the mid-1960s, Dan Hoffman and his wife Elizabeth bought an old farmhouse on Penobscot Bay in Maine, one cove over from the Nearings’.

“By now the Nearings with their ‘good life’ and their simplicity and their frugal back-to-the-land preachings were written up in the Whole Earth Catalogue,” recalls Hoffman, “and summer after summer there’d be an endless parade of Volkswagon minibuses in various states of disintegration crammed with hippie-type kids looking for the Nearings. So they were really the center of a cult.”

One year, Hoffman made a chair out of alder saplings, and along with fellow poet Phillip Booth brought it over to the Nearings’.

“I presented it to Scott, saying that this was the non-stipendiary chair of the Wharton School: the Nearing Chair,” recalls Hoffman. “Now, he was a very dour-looking man, but he really broke into a smile. The next summer I went to call, and I didn’t see it. So I asked Helen, ‘What has Scott done with the chair?’ And she said, ‘Oh, well, during the winter he cut it up for firewood and burned it.’”

In 1966, Nearing attended a peace meeting in Bar Harbor. One of the speakers was Dr. Derk Bodde, professor of what was then called Oriental Studies at Penn. After the meeting ended, Nearing wrote, Bodde came to him and said: “We always mention you around the University as the guarantor of the high degree of academic freedom that we now enjoy. Whatever the intention of the trustees when they dismissed you, the furor raised over the case stood as a horrendous warning to the University not to let it happen again.”

“My real regret is that I have been deprived of day-to-day contact with students in my chosen field,” Nearing wrote in his autobiography, which was published in 1972. “I am not bitter, vindictive, nor resentful. I look upon the whole affair as part of the cold war which has played so large a role in the history of individuals in the past half century.”

The University had changed a great deal by then. In 1973, on the recommendation of the faculty and then-President Martin Meyerson Hon’70, the trustees—led by the late William Day—invited the Nearings down to Penn. At a dinner held at the old Faculty Club, Meyerson presented the 89-year-old Nearing with a resolution. It read:

In recognition of a singular career begun as a member of the Faculty of the Wharton School, and for adhering to a belief that to seek out and to teach the truth is life’s highest aim, the Trustees have designated Scott Nearing as Honorary Emeritus Professor of Economics, effective April 25, 1973.

According to Meyerson, Nearing was “very happy” with the honorific. He mulls over his choice of words for a moment, then amends it: “I think he was overjoyed.”

The Nearings, he adds, expressed a desire that the University take over their house in Maine after their death—“keep the library there and use it as a kind of retreat for students to come up and use it in the summer.” For practical reasons, that didn’t work out. The hand-built house and property instead became the Good Life Center: “Advancing Helen and Scott Nearing’s commitment to social justice and simple living,” in the words of its Web site. But the request itself made it clear that the old warrior had finally accepted the peace pipe.

After the dinner at the Faculty Club, Nearing aired some of his political views, which were as far-left as they had ever been. “Helen was thinking that he was coming off as more of a socialist than he or she wanted him to be,” recalls Meyerson with a wry smile. “Finally she said, ‘Careful now. They may take your new professorship away!’”

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Copyright 2002 The Pennsylvania Gazette Last modified 2/28/02