Everett Dean Martin

Everett Dean Martin (July 5, 1880 – May 10, 1941) was an American minister, writer, lecturer, social psychologist, and an advocate of adult education. He was the final Director of the People's Institute of Cooper Union in New York City from 1922-1934. Martin was born in Jacksonville, Illinois on July 5th, 1880. Graduating with honors at the age of 24 from Illinois College in Jacksonville, he moved on to Chicago, attending McCormick Theological Seminary from 1904 until his ordination as a Congregational Minister in 1907. He was best known for his advocacy of the liberal education of adults, which he saw as “an antidote to both the irrationality of the crowd and the power of propaganda.”

In 1915, his successful life took a radical shift in course. He divorced his wife of eight years and left the professional ministry. He moved to New York and began writing for the New York Globe. .” Over the next 20 years, Martin developed into a successful writer and forged a national reputation as a charismatic public lecturer, often attracting a crowd of a thousand or more at the People's Institute, a major center for adult education in New York City.

In The Behavior of Crowds (1920), his first nationally reviewed book, he posed what he saw as the dilemma of the modern age: a technological information revolution that made it possible, in the absence of an adequate educational system, to influence ignorant men and women with propaganda and half-truths. Unscrupulous demagogues, corrupt politicians, manipulative advertisers, and revolutionary ideologues found ready-made audiences when they appealed to the baser instincts.

Martin was a classical, individualistic liberal, in the tradition of the Renaissance humanists and the authors of The Federalist Papers. He believed in restrained government and in the self-selection of intellectually promising students through appropriate programs of adult education.

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