Biography
Scott Nearing was a radical economist, pacifist, and later a founder of the American back-to-the-land movement. Dismissed from two universities for his politics, he wrote the antiwar pamphlet "The Great Madness" (1917) for the People's Council of America. In 1918 he was indicted under the Espionage Act for obstructing recruitment; at his 1919 trial the jury acquitted Nearing personally even as it convicted his publisher, the American Socialist Society — a notable free-speech verdict.
