[1] Ghent's ancestors had already been residents of America for a century, having settled in the state of North Carolina prior to the American Revolution.
[2] He attended public school and learned the printing trade as a young man, working as a compositor for a number of newspapers and magazines before moving into the field of journalism.
[3] Ghent became interested in socialism in 1892, becoming active in a Bellamy Club,[2] and initially espoused the English evolutionary socialist ideas of Fabianism.
[3] At the time of his entry into the SPA, Ghent was already well known among American socialists for his authorship of the widely read radical tome Our Benevolent Feudalism (1902).
An April 1906 meeting of the Board of Directors determined that the hiring of a paid executive to run the school was required and Ghent was nominated for the post.
Ghent broke with the Socialist Party over that organization's staunch opposition to World War I despite America's entry into that conflict in April 1917.
In 1923 Princeton University Press gathered a modified set of his essays from such magazines as The Weekly Review and The Independent under hard covers as a book entitled The Reds Bring Reaction.
[13] Ghent argued in this book that the ongoing wave of conservatism and anti-union legislation which swept America in the years after World War I was in large measure a response to the "theatricism and charlantry" of the revolutionary left.