Tag Archives: College Hall

In Praise of Scott Nearing, August 6, 1883 – August 24, 1983

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Patient Reader, remember that today (Aug. 3) marks the death anniversary of economist Veblen (1929), who was fired from the University of Chicago, and later fired from Stanford. Hats off, please.

This month also marks the birth and death of Scott Nearing, another of America’s major economists who tried to banish the Gothic ghosts and craven superstitions and self-serving mumbo-jumbo from the Haunted House of Classical Economics. Nearing got fired from Penn, and was smeared as a Red, and has been almost completely ignored by economists.

Nearing in an illustration for NY Call, 1918
Unlike fusty Henry George or shabby Thorstein Veblen, natty Nearing was a “solid sender” among radical economists. He even has a touch of Hollywood glamour. In 1981, near the end of his century-long life, Nearing lent his still handsome mug to fellow superhunk Warren Beatty, appearing as one of the interviewees in “Reds”.

Nearing was an extremely influential economist, and, like his friend Uptain Sinclair, a socialist/pacifist, and a visionary food writer (he was an activist vegetarian, and promoted Little Land-tyoe experiments). He listed as his most influential teachers: fellow Philadelphian Henry George; the Penn economist Simon Nelson Patten who was his academic mentor; and Count Leo Tolstoy, who never even visited Philadelphia. (Tolstoy had, however, a passionate interest in the writings of Henry George, Benjamin Franklin, and Walt Whitman; clearly Tolstoy picked up that Philly “addi-tood.” More about Tolstoy’s Brotherly Love, here: https://www.rbth.com/arts/327555-why-was-leo-tolstoy-fond)

Quoth Wikipedia: ‘Scott Nearing was a staunch advocate of a “new economics,” insisting 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.”‘

 Scott Nearing, Social Sanity: A Preface to the Book of Social Progress. New York: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1913; pp. 70–71. Cited in Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing, p. 28.
Nearing tried to tear down the velvet curtains, throw open the windows and locked attic doors, and banish the musty ghosts and vampires from the Haunted House of Classical Economics — College Hall. It was he who was banished from Wharton — and now it is he who haunts the hallowed halls of… oh skip it.

Nearing taught that human beings deserve an economy that works for us, rather than vice-versa. Further, he taught that we have all the tools we need, in our own co-operation and democratic organization, to built any kind of economy we choose, and escape the palsied clutches of Classical Economics, Private Money, and the Gold Standard. Unfortunately, these three ancient goblins and hags had just been enshrined in law as the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Upon pointing out the stupidity and inefficiency of trusting a reckless modern capitalism to these unworkable ghouls, Nearing was canned by the Wharton School. [In fact, Nearing may have helped sour the Wharton School on the entire discipline of economics. The department was long ago jettisoned from Wharton and demoted to the College, there to seduce the pre-meds and history majors with the sagging curves of supply and demand.]

‘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. 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.”

Penn’s board of trustees was heavily stacked with bankers, corporation lawyers, financiers, and corporation executives, and Nearing’s writing had not gone unnoticed. His tenuous situation had been exacerbated by an open letter to The North American in which he challenged the right wing evangelist Billy Sunday to apply the Gospel to the conditions of industrial capitalism, including “the railroad interests … the traction company … the manufacturers … the vested interests.” Reaction to Nearing’s dismissal from the academy was swift, with department head Patten and others issuing statements condemning the decision. Progressives in the Wharton School quickly compiled a summary of the facts of the case and sent it to 1500 newspapers, journals, and academics around the country. Even conservatives in the faculty were deeply troubled since, as one Wharton professor observed, “the moment Nearing went, any conservative statement became but the spoken word of a ‘kept’ professor.” Conversely, some radicals felt vindicated in their belief in the conservative nature of the American academy. Socialist writer Upton Sinclair told Nearing in an open letter that “You do not belong in a university. You belong with us Socialists and free lances . … Instead of addressing small numbers of college boys, you will be able to address large audiences of men.” Nearing’s dismissal was retrospectively called by one historian “the most famous breach of academic freedom” of the era.’

— Wikipedia entry on Scott Nearing

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/03/economics-global-economy-climate-crisis

(Click above for Andrew Simms in today’s Guardian, making a modern version of Scott Nearing’s — and Henry George’s, and Simon Patten’s, and Leo Tolstoy’s, Complaint. I wish the article mentioned them, but it didn’t, which is why I did. –Ed.)

The Trouble With Serpentine: College Hall

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College Hall (1872), the first building on Penn’s (then) new campus in West Philadelphia, was built largely with serpentine. Most of the other University buildings were, too. The green rock is abundant in West Chester and Lancaster, and had been traditionally used in eastern Pennsylvania for fieldstone farm buildings and meeting houses since colonial days, with few problems.

The vernacular architecture of eastern Pennsylvania includes serpentine fieldstone farm houses.

Serpentine became aesthetically trendy for Philadelphia buildings after 1850, in the wake of John Ruskin’s Gothic revival theories on color and ornament. Penn’s Provost Stille was a fan; he’d had his own Gothic green serpentine house built in Center City. Why shouldn’t the new Penn campus be built of Philadelphia’s own unusual local stone? It was a choice that felt both traditional, and innovative.

Nobody seems to have told the postcard-artists, working from black and white photos, that the building was green.

Thomas Richards, Penn’s architecture professor, made the serpentine concept even more dramatic by contrasting the green walls with other wonders of Pennyslvania geology: dark sparkly mica schist in the foundation, tan sandstone for the bands and lintels; pink marble columns and “Franklin stone’ in the baldachin. Lines of red and blue slate made up the roof: apparently the debut of Penn’s colors, “The Red and the Blue.”

He designed his hall with twin towers on the wings. His roofline bore all kinds of crotchets and spires and chimneys and other Gothic skyline filigree.

  • Chimneys gone, one tower gone….
  • Only two dinky spires left.
Renovations started in 1984; almost every serpentine stone in the building has been replaced by blocks of other green stone, or even cement.

Within a few years it was clear serpentine was a terrible structural mistake. In the clean air of Lancaster County, a serpentine barn worked fine. But “foul, foetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia” was the smoke-stack industry capital of the world. College Hall’s sensuous soft rock reacted with sulfur pollution in the air, and just seemed to flake away and dissolve. The heavy vertical features couldn’t be supported and were slowly taken down, one by one, through the decades. (In the latest renovations, College Hall lost the subtly-shaded red-and-blue roof slate tiles, replaced with uniform black. A regrettable oversight, or a misguided design choice to purge the Victorian building of its embarrassing Victorian-ness.)

Other city serpentine landmarks, like this church designed by Frank Furness, have suffered badly, too; only they don’t have Penn’s deep pockets.

I’m amazed that the Trustees didn’t just scrap College Hall in 1900, or in 1950, or in the 1970’s. Several of Richards’s matching buildings on campus were in fact razed. The original Medical School building, renamed Logan Hall, has been so worked over in the last 20 years that there’s not an original stone left.

But it is to the University’s credit that they chose to adapt these old buildings, decade by decade, far past the point at which other institutions would have given up. The facade couldn’t support the frou-frou, but the interior spaces always functioned beautifully: airy and healthy, plenty of light, spacious stairwells. Penn seems to understand how unique this is, and how beloved the buildings have become. The work was expensive, and design sacrifices were made, but the laudable goal seems always to be to save what’s valuable about this place, to keep it Gothic and green, even if it isn’t serpentine.