Richard Bartlett Gregg (1885–1974) was an American social philosopher said to be "the first American to develop a substantial theory of nonviolent resistance" based on the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, and so influenced the thinking of Martin Luther King Jr.,[1] Aldous Huxley,[2] civil-rights theorist Bayard Rustin,[3] the pacifist and socialist reformer Jessie Wallace Hughan,[4] and the Peace Pledge Union.
From 1917 to 1921 in Washington, D.C., at the NWLB,[6] Gregg became the 'examiner in charge' for the Bethlehem Steel strike, publishing a 1919 law article.
These seven years in industrial relations he described as "investigation, conciliation, arbitration, publicity and statistical work for trade unions.
[9] In an October 4, 1924 letter to his family Gregg explained his reasons for leaving the USA to take up residence in India.
This unique experience led him to conclude that government and industrialism were based on violence and that labor unions were ineffective as they worked within this framework and could not change it.
He thought that there might be another approach to creating a humane social system in work of Gandhi in India.
He then taught on various subjects connected with Gandhi's activism, e.g., for three years the school run by Samuel Evans Stokes of Simla.
Drawing on his learning and experience with Gandhi's Satyagraha, he published pamphlets, essays, books.
In India from 1956 to 1958, he taught ecology and economics at Gandhigram Rural University in Tamil Nadu (near Madurai), a school associated with G. Ramachandran whom Gregg had met in 1925 at Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram.
[23] An influential 1936 essay, "Simplified Living", his philosophical espousal of its need and benefit, was originally published in an Indian journal.