Scott Nearing is best known for Living the Good Life (1954), which he wrote with his wife Helen Nearing and which became an almost sacred text for many in the counterculture. But before he “dropped out” to find simplicity on a Vermont farm, he had a long history of activist work for progressive causes; his views on economic inequality, and on child labor in particular, got him fired from the Wharton School in 1915. His views on World War I got him fired again, this time from the University of Toledo, 1917; later, like Eugene V. Debs, he was indicted under the Espionage Act, not for a speech but for a pamphlet titled The Great Madness: A Victory for American Plutocracy (1917). He was tried in February 1919 and acquitted.
Nearing’s own antiwar writing is turgid and preachy; this lively account of his Espionage Act trial by the Italian-American poet, journalist, and self-described “militant revolutionist” Arturo Giovannitti (1884–1959) does him better justice. (Giovannitti had himself been acquitted of murder charges after a textile strike in 1912; he published Arrows in the Gale, a book of poems, in 1914, and his antiwar play Come era nel principio was performed in New York in 1916.)
ON the 15th day of February, 1919—so will the People’s Commissary of Historical Research write a few years hence—the city of New York began to proclaim its moral and intellectual independence from the dictatorship of Woodrow Wilson and struck the first blow at the judicial terror inaugurated by his Fouquier-Tinville, Thomas W. Gregory. On that day twelve respectable citizens, none of whom had invested anything, not even sympathy, in the ventures and fortunes of Socialism, acquitted Scott Nearing of a charge of sedition and by that act granted a temporary respite to the execution of Democracy on the part of the bourgeois Bolshevism of the Democratic Party.
The facts in the case are well known. Nearing wrote a pamphlet entitled The Great Madness, in which, among various things, he stated that the reasons that prompted America to join the war were purely commercial, if not altogether mercenary, and that the desire to save democracy and to establish international amity had as much to do with it as a prize-fight in Nevada has to do with the physical improvement of the white race, or a cock fight in New Mexico with the future welfare of our gallinaceous posterity.
So long as Nearing merely confined himself to believing this, he was perfectly safe, neither Hudson Maxim nor the National Security League having yet invented a seismograph applicable to the human cranium to detect and record seditious vibrations—but when he said it, and wrote it down and allowed it to be printed and circulated, then the trouble began. Mr. Gregory himself has repeatedly stated that nobody was ever prosecuted for holding an opinion—indeed, it is when the opinion is no longer held, but allowed to run at large that the law must get busy to bottle it up again. In other words, to further quote our ineffable Attorney General, anybody is absolutely free to think whatever he pleases, provided he keeps his mouth shut—a sound and wise principle of great antiquity which was never interfered with, save by the Dominican torture of the Inquisition and our own Liberty Bond solicitors, the only two great institutions that insisted on prying all lips open, to the greater glory of God and democracy. So there is no telling when your mouth is open, shut or just ajar. The only way one can find out is to wait till one is indicted.
Now, Scott Nearing had no intention whatever of undermining the morale of the army and inciting to resistance against the government. His intention was that of thinking about the war, and being a professor, and therefore much addicted to thinking aloud, he recorded his own meditations in writing, feeling wisely apprehensive of the accuracy of police stenographers. Very likely he naively assumed that he was in the privileged position of a scientist trying to get at the causes of social phenomena, and as such phenomena had already taken place, and his findings could neither change nor modify their effects, he also assumed that he was immune from prosecution. Of course he was right, and also was wrong.
That he was against the war for the horrors that it entails was no more accountable against him than if he had been against a Texas cyclone, and his privilege to so feel was cheerfully recognized even by the District Attorney. But when he set out to discover the causes of the war and the cyclone, and attributed them to the rapacity of American capitalism and the inclemencies of the Texan climate, then he deliberately interfered with the rights of other citizens to carry on their legitimate business and sell real estate, and maliciously and feloniously libelled the government of the United States and the sweet meteorological disposition of the State of Texas.
Had he undertaken to study a volcanic eruption in Italy or a cloudburst in the South Sea Islands, and arrived at the conclusion that they were not an act of God, as our insurance policies claim, but a dastardly deed of the Devil, nobody would have quarreled with him and no ecclesiastical tribunal in the world would have burned him alive. Theologians differ on such subjects, and as a matter of fact they rather incline to attribute those pranks to the Evil One, especially when it is the righteous and the godly that perish. Infernal forces and motives are always sought out by divines and prosecutors whose sole business is to discover sins and crimes rather than virtues and saintly purposes—but when it comes to wars, famines, unemployment, poverty, social injustice, then it is the inscrutable will of God that is at work. The reason is that the Devil could be defeated, but God must not be resisted.
But let us get back to Nearing. The first time I ever heard him speak in public was in the courtroom, at his own trial. The reason why I never went to any of his lectures was because he was a professor, and I always had a double grudge against professors, both as a student in the palmy days of my college life when they examined me, and as a militant revolutionist when I began to examine them. The only professor who ever won my esteem and admiration was the director of a school of cutting, who insisted on making me a suit of clothes for nothing on the chance that I might advertise his sartorial atheneum during a tailors’ strike. I am sorry to say that he went bankrupt before the suit was delivered.
So when Scott Nearing joined the Socialist movement, I decided that it was chiefly due to the fact that no other movement wanted him, and I kept disdainfully away from his meetings. I scornfully disposed of him as a pampered intellectual trying to rap for silence in the epic din of a proletarian mob in order to make a little squeak of his own. I refused to believe that he was a Socialist. I didn’t give a hang for his economics. I held in supercilious contempt all his social cataplasms: child labor laws, old age pensions, income taxes, government ownership and the rest of the indecent farrago of petty bourgeois reforms. In a word, I concluded that he was the academic correlative of that pious and sanctimonious demi-monde in the Socialist Party that had given us a lot of spirituality with John Spargo and Alexander Irvine, a quagmire of muckraking bunk with Charlie Russell, a gush of romantic glucose with Ernest Poole and Upton Sinclair and a flood of saccharine sentimentality over the cardial affairs of those two elongated Puritans, Walling and Stokes. Ah me! Ou sont-ils les jours d’Antan? Gone, gone, all of them are gone! Putrescant in pace!
Well, I most contritely make humble and honorable amends for having judged Scott Nearing according to precedent. I take back whatever I thought of him. I regret and kick myself for having missed his speeches and lectures for over a year, and I promise that from now on I shall dog his steps like the most devoted socialette that ever embellished a pew of the Rand School. But again, on second thought, it was just as good that I never heard him before, for in that case I should have missed the real big thrill of his trial. Let us call it a trial, but really it was no trial at all. The government never had a chance—it was just Scott Nearing taking the platform by a skilful coup d’etat brilliantly staged by his attorney, Seymour Stedman, and lecturing judge, jury, audience and court attendants on the weighty questions of the day. It was fine. It was thrilling. It was a big and manful job. It felt so good to see it done, that I almost got reconciled with professors, the Lord forbid!
The prosecution must have felt like a Meyer London resolution in the committee room of Congress. It confined itself to reading The Great Madness to the jury, and to proving its authorship and publication, which were cheerfully admitted by all witnesses, chiefly officials of the Rand School of Social Science. Then it rested its case, and from that moment on it was Scott Nearing who took charge of the proceedings, who held court, who answered questions and asked them, who argued, debated, lectured, read, scolded and cracked jokes. For two whole days he turned the courtroom into a classroom, the witness stand into a chair of revolutionary economics, the judge into an invited guest of the faculty and the jury into a bunch of still unhazed freshmen. With a debonair smile on his wholesome young face, with his legs crossed and a pile of books, mostly his own, on his lap, he talked hour after hour with a clear resonant voice that carried to every corner of the hall, unhaltingly, directly, aggressively, never stopping a single second to select his words or to qualify his statements.
He was not an accused on trial before his judges, not a thinker defending a new unorthodox theory before a synod of academicians, nor was he even the usual agitator haranguing a hostile crowd—he was just the scientific investigator who had arrived at the true diagnosis of a social sore and was telling it to his patients. Indeed I had the distinct impression that that crowd felt as if they were in the waiting room of a clinic listening to a famous doctor prescribing plain remedies to them, and marveling that it was all so true and so simple.
Lawyer Stedman, a fine, sagacious male Portia whose head bears a striking likeness to that of Cicero, and whose overbrimming sense of humor would cheer up even a bone-dry State, was soon reduced to asking a question every hour or so, the rest of the time being filled with the ready and driving answer. Even Mr. Barnes, the Government’s Attorney, soon found no room to wedge in an objection, or perhaps was too deeply engrossed in the arguments of the defendant to think of objecting. Only the judge tried now and then to dam the flood of sparkling eloquence with a few inconsequential questions; but that was just to save the floundering decorum of the court and to remind the public that it was still a trial that was going on.
But Nearing did not care about the trial. He answered everything directly, without hesitation, almost belligerently, and the more involved and captious the question, the more straightforward and pugnacious was the answer. He tore through all the barbed wire entanglements of the procedure like a tank in full blast, unmindful of the pitfalls and hidden mines of the cross-examination, splendidly and joyously unconcerned about whatever subtle and cavilling interpretation might be put on his words. So much so that Mr. Stedman had to stop him on several occasions and once had to invoke the authority of the court in order to keep his own client with the bounds of the interrogatory. And all the time Nearing kept on smiling his strange unhumorous smile that was neither meant to disarm nor to provoke his opponent, but, so at least I felt, was a necessary part of his martial accoutrement, a sort of pleasant war paint that could not be dispensed with.
What he said—for the whole trial consisted of what he said—I hope will soon be published in book form, it being impossible to quote him in full and inadequate to quote him in part. Besides I am a very poor reporter. Suffice it to say, however, that he stood by everything he wrote, that he took nothing back, apologized for nothing, palliated nothing, and reiterated everything he had written with added emphasis, from his uncompromising opposition to the war to his determination to fight till human exploitation, the fountainhead of all wars, has been forever blotted out of the earth.
When he got through all felt that he had made his point, and that he had tried from the very beginning to carry his point rather than to win his case. That he was finally acquitted after thirty hours of deliberation on the part of the jury was an insignificant incident. The jury simply couldn’t help it. They must have felt in the seclusion of their room, after such a long session of lessons, that they were there not to write a verdict, but to write their examination papers on a major subject of which two weeks before they knew nothing about. And they made the only answer pupils can make on moot academic questions—they agreed with the personal theory of their professor.
But really it did not matter at all whether he was acquitted or not. He himself did not care, nor did anyone else. It wasn’t important. Personally I am almost sorry that he was acquitted. I resent it as a great injustice. Why should such a man be denied the great distinction of serving twenty years in the Revolutionary Parliament of Fort Leavenworth when a man like Victor Berger is granted that privilege?
I could not help drawing a parallel between the two: one defending himself with all weapons, the other accusing; one trying to wriggle out of a mess by crying: “I did not do it; it’s my enemy Bill Haywood that done it,” and the other superbly shouting across the storm: “Yes, I did it, and I will do it again, and more.”
I wonder whether we couldn’t swap Nearing for Victor Berger. Truly the latter belongs to Congress, among the respectables. Truly Nearing belongs to the penitentiary among the outcasts.