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.

[1] 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.

[3] 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.

[5] Despite an upbringing in a life of privilege made possible in no small measure by the harsh anti-union policies of his patriarchal grandfather,[6] 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.

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.

[8] 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.

[12] Nearing was a staunch advocate of a "new economics," which insisted that ... economists part company with the ominous pictures of an overpopulated, starving world, prostrate before the throne of "competition," "individual initiative," "private property," or some other pseudo-god, and tell men in simple, straightforward language how they may combine, re-shape, or overcome the laws and utilize them as a blessing instead of enduring them as a burden and a curse.

[17] But Nearing's aggressive social activism in the classroom and through the printed word brought him into conflict with his employers at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, resulting in his dismissal and his emergence as a cause célèbre of the American radical movement during the next decade.

On the morning of June 16, 1915, Nearing's secretary telephoned him to report that a letter from the provost had arrived, saying that "as the term of your appointment as assistant professor of economics for 1914–1915 is about to expire, I am directed by the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania to inform you that it will not be renewed.

He joined the American Union Against Militarism in 1916 and delivered a series of speeches condemning the "Preparedness" campaign then being promoted by Woodrow Wilson and the nation's political elite.

[28] Nearing also authored a series of pamphlets, published by the Rand School, one of which, The Great Madness: A Victory for the American Plutocracy, resulted in his indictment under the Espionage Act for alleged "obstruction to the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States.

[30] The prosecution attempted to show that Nearing, by writing against militarism, had illegally interfered with the ability of the United States government to recruit and conscript troops for its military activities in Europe.

The Socialist Party of America split in the summer of 1919, with a factionalized Communist movement leaving to forge an underground existence in the years after the Palmer Raids.

"It was a fascinating experience to visit this important educational laboratory in its opening experimental stages," he later recalled, noting that theories were then being actively tested with regard to subject matter, method of instruction, and social organization of students and teachers alike.

Members included Dale Zysman, Sam Krieger, Eve Dorf, and her husband Ben Davidson,[39][40] as well as Alfred J. Brooks, Myra Page, Benjamin Mandel, and Rachel Ragozin.

[43] While there, Nearing rather boldly gave a speech at Yenching University on his book The American Empire, in a room darkened so that audience members could not be later identified and denounced.

These speaking tours continued into the early 1930s, by which time public interest in attending live speeches and debates on political themes had waned and ill health forced Nearing's agent into retirement.

[47] In the 1930s and 1940s, Nearing and Helen Knothe, a lifelong vegetarian, lived together in Winhall in rural Vermont, where they had purchased a large forest tract for $2200 and a moderate-sized farm for $2500.

[48] However, in her book "Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life", Jean Hay Bright documents that the Nearings were both heavily subsidized by substantial inheritances which supported their forest farm.

The book, in which war, famine, and poverty were discussed, described a nineteen-year "back to the land experiment," and also advocated modern-day "homesteading" and vegan organic gardening.

In the winter of 1956–57, the couple toured Canada, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, generating a book about their experiences called Socialists Around the World.

The pair visited Leningrad, Moscow, Stalingrad, Baku, Tashkent, and Irkutsk, touring schools and universities, apartment buildings in the process of construction, factories, and collective farms in the course of their trip.

"[59] Nearing appears in the film Reds (1981) as one of the many documentary "witnesses," telling stories about his friend John Reed and the heady days leading up to the Russian Revolution.

[65] In 2016, Portland Press Herald columnist Avery Yale Kamila reported: "In the 1977 documentary film "Living the Good Life," Scott Nearing stands in the couple's huge Maine garden and addresses a group of people interested in homesteading.

As an octogenarian summing up his life, Nearing recalled: I have spent 70 years of study and travel in order to equip myself with information that would enable me to speak and write with authority on the course of world affairs.

Shortly after its founding in 1949, Nearing began contributing a "World Events" column to the independent theoretical Monthly Review, established by dissident Marxist economists Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman.

[70] During his 1919 trial for allegedly obstructing American military recruitment during World War I, at which he testified in his own defense, the prosecution asked Nearing whether he was a "pacifist socialist."

Other influences he acknowledged in his memoirs included Socrates, Gautama Buddha, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus, Confucius, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Otis Whitman, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Victor Hugo, Edward Bellamy, Olive Schreiner, Richard Maurice Bucke, and Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe.

His long, difficult journey from an orthodox reformer of the ruling class from within to a complete secessionist from capitalist cultural hegemony led him by 1932 to choose homesteading—an experiment Nearing called "living the good life."

[76]Nearing's chosen lifestyle of "Tolstoian," ascetic, rural self-sufficiency may be reasonably interpreted as the attempt of a self-aware dissident individual to avoid inevitably negative participation in the internal life of the group (be it a government or a political party), while retaining a keen and almost obsessive interest in the dynamics of society and the world as a whole.