Scott Nearing

Scott Nearing
Scott Nearing (1915)
Born	August 6, 1883 Morris Run, Tioga County, Pennsylvania
Died	August 24, 1983(1983-08-24) (aged 100) Harborside, Maine
Cause of death	Fasting
Nationality	U.S.
Education	PhD in Economics (1909)
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania
Occupation	radical economist, educator, writer
Years active	1905-1982
Known for	political activist, author, and advocate of simple living
Movement	Socialism, Communism
Spouse(s)	Nellie Marguerite Seeds Nearing; Helen Nearing
Children	John Scott Robert Nearing (adopted}

Scott Nearing (August 6, 1883 – August 24, 1983) was an American radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, and advocate of simple living.

Nearing was born in Morris Run, Tioga County, Pennsylvania, the heart of the state's coal country. Nearing's grandfather, Winfield Scott Nearing, had arrived in Tioga County with his family in 1864, at the age of 35, when he accepted a job as a civil and mining engineer. Before the end of the year he had assumed full control of mining operations as the superintendent of the Morris Run Coal Company, a position of authority which he held for the remainder of his working life. An intense, driven man, Scott Nearing's grandfather studied science and nature, practiced gardening and carpentry, and regularly received crates of books from New York City, amassing a large personal library. In his memoirs written late in his life, Scott Nearing would recall his grandfather as one of the four most influential figures in his life. Nearing's upbringing was that of a young bourgeois, his mother employing a part-time tutor and two Polish servants to clean the gleaming white house atop a hill overlooking the town. Scott's brother recalled that the citizens of Morris Run had treated the handsome and intelligent Scott "the way they would treat the heir to the nobleman.... They all treated him with awe."

Nearing's father was a small businessman and stockbroker, his mother a vigorous, energetic, and idealistic woman whom Nearing later credited with instilling in him an appreciation for the higher things in life: nature, books, and the arts. Despite an upbringing in a life of privilege made possible in no small measure by the harsh anti-union policies of his patriarchal grandfather, young Scott nevertheless developed a social conscience, which one of his biographers describes as "a burr under his skin that none of his relatives acquired and that no interpretation satisfactorily explains."

Nearing graduated from high school in 1901 and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania Law School, "where corporate bias so violated his idealism that after one year he quit." Instead, he studied oratory at Temple University in Philadelphia and enrolled in the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania, where he immersed himself in the emerging science of economics. At the Wharton School, Nearing was deeply influenced by Simon Nelson Patten, an innovative and unconventional educator and founding father of the American Economic Association. Nearing distinguished himself as a "Wharton man" during the progressive era, one of the proverbial "best and brightest" trained in practical economics to be readied for a place as a responsible leader of the community. In the words of another of his students, Patten taught innovative thinking—"making use of creative intelligence to master new situations irrespective of received dogma." Nearing seems to have found these new intellectual tools for potential social change to be exciting and liberating. He completed his undergraduate program in just three years, while simultaneously engaging in campus politics and competitive debate.