BENIGN RADICAL

...reviewed by David L. Graham When a man eighty-eight years of age looks back on his life, his most vivid recollections are likely to be related to scenes farthest away, the scenes of his youth...

...He sees mankind "astride a guided missile equipped with a nuclear warhead . . . the process of vaporing Western civilization is well under way...

...Under the kindly but exacting tutelage of this self-taught, resourceful man, Nearing acquired habits of hard work and precise thinking while learning the fundamentals of accounting, gardening, and mechanical and civil engineering— habits and training that were to stand him in good stead when he quit civilization ("city living") in the early Thirties and took up organic farming, first in Vermont, later in Maine, where he now lives...

...involvement in World War I. In 1918 the Federal Government indicted Nearing for 'attempting to cause insubordination and mutiny, and for obstructing recruiting," but the jury acquitted him...

...In both Vermont and Maine the Nearings have lived the good life, devoting an average of four hours a day to "bread labor" (maintaining their abode and producing about eight per cent of what they eat) and spending the rest of the day in study, writing, the enjoyment of music, and the company of their friends and admirers— with time off for travel throughout the United States and in many foreign countries...

...The place of the teacher," said Patten, "is on the firing line of progress...

...Yet many considered him a menace to society...

...For him life is an assignment—"to seek out the truth, to teach the truth, to weave truth, justice, and mercy into the fabric of human society...

...Opportunities to debate his views dwindled away, publishers dropped him, and he was hounded out of the teaching profession...

...In 1932, Nearing began the experiment that brought him renewed recognition, furnished material for some of his best known books (Living the Good Life and The Maple Sugar Book, written with the collaboration of his wife), and provided scope for his many talents...

...He and his wife, Helen— no man could be a Nearing without a Helen—took up subsistence farming, or homesteading, as Nearing calls it, in Vermont...

...In this, it would seem, no one has succeeded...

...They explain what it was in those most formative years that made Scott Nearing the man he became...

...Nearing had lectured on the Chautauqua circuit for years and debated the best speakers of his time—Clarence Darrow, Bertrand Russell, John Haynes Holmes, Paul Douglas, and many others...

...Graham is a free lance writer...

...The blow, while not wholly unforeseen, was so sudden and brutal that it left a wound which has never quite healed—perhaps because the wound was reopened two years later, when Nearing lost his job at the University of Toledo for opposing U.S...

...But the accounts of these debates, sensational as they were in their day, have the dry, yellowing quality of newspaper clippings...

...Nearing's style, like his debating technique, is deliberately factual and shorn of humor and literary embellishments...

...Not only are the descriptions of Nearing's childhood at Morris Run, Pennsylvania, a mining and lumbering community, the most intimate and colorful...

...Another great influence in Nearing's life was Tolstoy...

...Though separated from formal teaching for fifty years, Nearing is still the benign schoolmaster...

...So it is with Scott Nearing's autobiography, The Making of a Radical...

...Nearing soon took his place on that firing line and, like his mentor, was eventually fired from the University after nine years of teaching, apparently for advocating child labor laws and a better break for the working man...

...This failure haunts him constantly...

...I disturb the life process as little as I can...

...His article, "As the Nation Goes, So Goes Maine," appeared in the February issue of The Progressive...

...As an organic gardener, he not only eats no meat or fish but uses no traps or pesticides...

...they are also, in a way, the most interesting...

...But one great fulfillment has eluded Nearing—his hope of helping to establish a cooperative, nonviolent, socialist society instead of the acquisitive, competitive "rat race" of capitalism...

...Morris Run was a company town, capitalism in the raw...

...Like Tolstoy, Nearing became a socialist, a pacifist, and a vegetarian...

...Twenty years later they left Vermont—it was being "developed"—and took over an abandoned farm on Cape Rosier in Maine...

...But who has been more faithful to an ideal...

...Both as a student and later as a teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, Nearing came under the influence of Simon Patten, an inspiring economics professor, who pointed the way through economics to compassion for the underdog...

...Nearing's grandfather, who was superintendent of the mine, ran the town...