43 Facts About Scott Nearing

Scott Nearing was an American radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, pacifist, vegetarian and advocate of simple living.

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.

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.

Scott 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.

Scott Nearing's father was a small businessman and stockbroker, his mother a vigorous, energetic, and idealistic woman whom Scott Nearing later credited with instilling in him an appreciation for the higher things in life: nature, books, and the arts.

At the Wharton School, Scott Nearing was deeply influenced by Simon Nelson Patten, an innovative and unconventional educator and founding father of the American Economic Association.

Scott 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.

Scott Nearing completed his undergraduate program in just three years, while simultaneously engaging in campus politics and competitive debate.

Scott Nearing received his BS degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1905 and his PhD in Economics in 1909.

From 1908 until 1915 while living in Arden, Delaware, Scott Nearing taught economics and sociology at the Wharton School and Swarthmore College, authoring a stream of books on economics and social problems.

Scott Nearing was a staunch advocate of a "new economics," which insisted that.

Much as Karl Marx drew radical implications from the ideas of the conservative Hegel, Scott 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.

Scott 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.

Scott Nearing 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 Scott Nearing's Toledo days, as he later recalled in his memoirs:.

Scott Nearing assumed the chairmanship of that organization that fall.

On July 1,1917, Scott Nearing joined the Socialist Party and began a new job, working for the next six years as a lecturer in economics and sociology at the Socialist Party's Rand School of Social Science.

Scott Nearing was a prolific public speaker during this time, estimating that he had given approximately 200 speeches a year during the war years.

The prosecution attempted to show that Scott Nearing, by writing against militarism, had illegally interfered with the ability of the United States government to recruit and conscript troops for its military activities in Europe.

Scott Nearing produced concrete figures to show that since 1912, membership in the Socialist Party had "steadily declined" and drew an explosive conclusion from this:.

Scott Nearing finally applied for membership in the WPA in December 1924 but was initially rejected, living for the next two years as a non-party fellow traveler of the organization.

Scott Nearing finally gained admission to the Workers Party in 1927 and went to work on the staff of its daily newspaper, The Daily Worker, on May 9,1928, remaining there until resigning in January 1930 to publish a study on imperialism that failed to pass the organization's ideological scrutiny.

In 1925, Scott Nearing spent two months in the Soviet Union visiting schools and talking with educational authorities.

In 1925 or 1926, Scott Nearing taught a class on the law of social revolution.

In 1927, Scott Nearing made his first trip to Asia, traveling to China by ship for a three-month stay.

Scott Nearing remained a prominent figure of the American Left throughout the decade of the 1920s, producing a series of pamphlets on various radical political themes.

Scott Nearing was engaged professionally on the lecture circuit, making use of an agent to arrange speaking tours for about 20 years.

John Scott Nearing wrote a participant's account of having worked in industry in the Soviet Union during the 1930s.

Scott Nearing adopted a vegetarian diet when he was 35.

Cash was earned from producing maple syrup and maple sugar from the trees on their land and from Scott Nearing's occasional paid lectures.

Scott Nearing wrote and self-published many pamphlets on topics such as low income, peace throughout the world, feminism, and different environmental causes.

In 1968, Scott Nearing signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Scott Nearing appears in the film Reds as one of the many documentary "witnesses," telling stories about his friend John Reed and the heady days leading up to the Russian Revolution.

Scott Nearing was a vice president of the International Vegetarian Union.

Scott Nearing was a regular speaker at the conferences held by the International Vegetarian Union.

In 1921 Scott Nearing was, along with his colleague Louis Lochner, a co-founder of a forerunner of the Federated Press, a news service that sent out domestic and international news releases and picture mats five days a week to the labor and radical press in America.

Shortly after its founding in 1949, Scott Nearing began contributing a "World Events" column to the independent theoretical Monthly Review, established by dissident Marxist economists Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman.

Scott Nearing died on August 24,1983, eighteen days after his 100th birthday.

Scott Nearing's death was planned and he advertised it six weeks before to his friends at the dinner table.

Scott Nearing gave up food and his body gradually lost all strength.

Scott Nearing died with his wife Helen beside him at his home at Forest Farm in Harborside, Maine.

Scott Nearing voyaged to the wilderness as if on a pilgrimage to a sacred place.

Scott Nearing repeatedly drew inspiration from the life story of Count Leo Tolstoi, whose life Scott Nearing clearly saw as analogous to his own:.