Scott Nearing and the Madness of War
By Colman McCarthy
In early August 1983 I made a mid-day phone call to Harborside, Maine and the home of Scott and Helen Nearing. It was both a personal and professional call. Scott was days away from his 100th birthday and I wanted to offer my thanks for all he had done in both words and example to educate me and uncounted others in the art of living simply so others could simply live. Professionally, I had a few questions for Scott, with his expected answer being the muscle and bones of a column I planned to writer for my paper, The Washington Post.
Helen answered the phone. She was cordial, ready to take a break from the day’s chores. Scott, she said, was resting and, with wifely solicitude, thought it best not to rouse him. He wants to make it to 100, she added, and then slip off.
Three weeks later, he did. Instead of a column, I wrote an obituary--one of 700 words but which should have been 7,000 words and a with a footnote at the end warning readers that the full measure of this unique citizen--teacher, writer, philosopher, agitator, earthman, pacifist--could not be known in a mere newspaper story.
Talk was heard at Scott’s death that because he was so singular a thinker, and so rare a practitioner of peace, that his legacy would fade without his presence. The opposite has happened. The Good Life Center at Forest Farm remains--no, thrives--as a haven of energy, as seen in everything from meaningful manual labor to the vibrant exchange of ideas and ideals.
A generous helping of the latter is to be found in these pages. The annotations provided by Greg Joly will take the reader on a well-paced ride through the mind and times of Scott Nearing. As one example among many of Mr. Joly’s steady and scholarly hand, look at page 16 where Scott Nearing writes: “The revolutionary fury that was passing through the country broke out menacingly in Colorado, West Virginia, Lawrence, Paterson, Bayonne and New York.” In six notes, the reader is served the facts behind the fury.
“The Great Madness” was published in 1917, the same year that Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a pacifist and first woman elected to Congress, took to the House floor to oppose the U.S. entry into the First World War. “You can no more win a war than win an earthquake,” she cried out. Just as Congresswoman Rankin was seen as a disturber of the peace--she was defeated the next election--Scott Nearing in 1917 was taking his hits. In June of that year, Congress enacted the Espionage Act, a law that allowed federal snoops to raid the Nearing home in hopes of finding evidence of seditious activity. They found none.
But they went from snooping to sniffing, the scent of “The Great Madness” overwhelming the nostrils of Woodrow Wilson’s espionage hunters. In 1918 he and the American Socialist Society--the publisher of “The Great Madness” were--were indicted for violating the Espionage Act. G-men, out to get their man, tailed Nearing from lecture hall to lecture hall, ears alert to catch a seditious syllable. The case went to trial. Nearing told the jury that he wrote “The Great Madness” “as a teacher,” one who “saw what I believed to be a great menace to the liberties of the American people, namely: the growing power of the plutocracy, the growing power it was gaining through the war.”
The jury was out for 30 hours, coming back with a verdict of not guilty. Ever the writer and teacher, Nearing in 1918 produced a pamphlet titled “Address to the Jury.” It is a classic in the field of jurisprudence, on a high level with Mahatma Gandhi’s statement to a British jury four years later when he, like Nearing, was accused of uttering less than happy talk about the government.
The details of the Nearing trial can be found in “Scott Nearing: An Intellectual Biography” (Temple University Press), the masterly work of John Saltmarsh.
Jeannette Rank was not the only contemporary of Scott Nearing to work the opposite side of the street to abusive power. The American Left--when it really was the Left of the heartiest kind--was well-peopled with philosophical allies of Nearing. They included Dorothy Day, I.F Stone, George Seldes, Eugene Debs, Roger Baldwin, Robert LaFollette, Alice Paul, Emma Goldman, John Reed, Emily Balch, Jane Addams, A. Randolph Philips, Norman Thomas, Martin Luther King, Jr., and a long list of others.
Some lines from I. F. Stone, the towering figure of American journalism during the 1950s and 60s, ably summarize the mission of Scott Nearing and his companions: “The only kinds of fights worth having are those that you’re going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have to be willing to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” Much praise to Greg Joly and his friends at The Good Life Center for reviving “The Great Madness” and fleshing it out with notes. In my high school, college and law school classes on pacifism and nonviolence that I’ve been teaching for the past quarter-century, I make sure my students know about Scott Nearing and his relevance to our times. The madness of war persists, for sure, but so do those who push on to find alternatives. Many push themselves on up to Maine and the Good Life Center. Lucky them.