Nearing, Scott and Helen Nearing

NEARING, SCOTT (1883–1983) and HELEN NEARING (1904-1995). The only American radical to be a major figure in the anti-war socialist movement of the 1910s and the alternative-cultural movement of the 1970s and the 1980s, Scott Nearing was born into a privileged family in Morris Run, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in an environment of conspicuous class differences. For forty years his grandfather, Winfield Scott Nearing, ruled Morris Run as superintendent of the coal-mining company town. “Czar Nearing,” as he was called, broke strikes by evicting workers. Nearing’s mother came from a well-to-do banker’s family in New Jersey and his father, Louis, operated the Morris Run produce store.
Nearing responded enthusiastically to the social-consciousness doctrines of his mentor Simon Patten, a professor at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. Patten’s guiding principle was that teachers should be “on the firing line of progress.” Nearing earned a doctorate in 1909 and taught economics at the Wharton School for nine years. He was fired in 1915 by the university trustees for his outspoken views against child labor; many of the trustees owned manufacturing plants that hired children. His case became nationally celebrated as a major university assault on academic freedom.

In 1917 Nearing was again fired for his political views, this time by the University of Toledo for his outspoken opposition to U.S. preparedness for World War I. Nearing became a prominent figure in the antiwar movement. He characterized war as “organized destruction and mass murder.” In 1918, after the American Socialist Society published his forty-four-page pamphlet The Great Madness, the U.S. government indicted him for treason. Nearing delivered such an eloquent defense at his trial (6–19 February 1919) that he was acquitted, the only major pacifist to escape prison.

A member of the Socialist Party from 1917 to 1922, Nearing ran unsuccessfully on the Socialist ticket against Fiorello La Guardia for the Congressional seat in New York’s Fourteenth District. In 1927 he joined the Communist Party but left it two years later when officials in Moscow refused approval of the publication of his book The Twilight of Empire. He was sufficiently important for the Party to publicly expel him on 8 January 1930 in an announcement published in the Daily Worker.

The previous year, Nearing had met Helen Knothe of Ridgewood, New Jersey, where her father ran a clothing business. He had been separated for five years from his first wife, Nellie Seeds. Helen and Scott bought a farm in Jamaica, Vermont, in 1932 under the assumption that it was better to be poor in the country than in the city. They refurbished the farm and turned it into a showcase organic farmstead and maple sugar orchard. They also wrote exhaustively about their commitment to vegetarianism, organic farming, and a simple lifestyle. The Nearings moved to Harborside Maine, in 1951, partly to escape ski development in Vermont. Three years later they published their most widely read book, Living the Good Life. It was reprinted in 1970 and remains a guide for millions of people disenchanted with capitalistic materialism, modern urban life, degradation of natural resources, and the chemicalization of food.

By the 1970s, Scott Nearing had become a living legend among a new generation devoted to personal health and environmental issues, but he had also retained links with his earlier activism. He traveled, lectured, and wrote extensively. In addition to hundreds of newspaper and journal articles, including his “World Events” column in the Monthly Review (1953–1972), he authored more than fifty books and monographs.

Over the years his respect and hope for civilization dimmed, one reason that led him to a self-sufficient homesteading life in rural New England. Nonetheless, he continued to work as an independent radical for a united world based on a federation of nations. He also became an international spokesperson for the view that vegetarianism and organic farming were essential to solve global food, health, and environmental problems. Two years after he appeared as a “witness” in the film Reds about his friend and colleague John Reed, Scott Nearing died at home at the age of one hundred.

After Scott Nearing’s death, Helen Nearing continued to live in the Maine farmhouse they had built out of natural materials. She also continued to promote the back-to-the-land and vegetarian movements to which they had dedicated so much of their lives. Among her new books was Leaving and Living the Good Life, an account of their final years together with considerable biographical material on their entire lives. Upon her death the Nearing home became the Good Life Center, a nonprofit institution for education and retreats.

Nearing, Scott. The Conscience of a Radical. Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1965.

Nearing, Scott. The Making of a Radical: A Political Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Saltmarsh, John A. Scott Nearing: An Intellectual Biography. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Sherman, Steve, ed. A Scott Nearing Reader: The Good Life in Bad Times. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1989.

Whitfield, Stephen J., Scott Nearing: Apostle of American Radicalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.

The Scott and Helen Nearing Papers. Walden Woods Project. Wayback Machine. Internet Archive.