This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [25]
“If he had any more wrinkles, you’d have to roll him out to see what he looked like,” the joke went. Others used the comparison to an apple that had been in the root cellar all winter, the skin leathery and mapped with lines.
“I’ve been sent to tell you it’s lunchtime,” Papa told him, feeling an easy comfort in the warmth and peace of the walled garden. When Scott looked up in greeting, the lines of his face softened from forehead to cheeks as he smiled, revealing a strong and handsome bone structure beneath.
“Hello, son,” he said. “Grab a hoe and help me finish.”
Born nearly a century earlier in the rural Pennsylvania town of Morris Run, Scott saw the first telephone, flush toilet, and electric lights come to town during his childhood. After attending the University of Pennsylvania, he received a graduate degree in business and became secretary of the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee, fighting against big businesses for child labor laws. Despite some successes, he decided instead to become an economics and sociology professor at Penn, where he wrote pamphlets and books on child labor, women’s issues, wage and income, racial and social change, and eventually war.
In 1915 Penn’s trustees decided not to renew Scott’s contract, as many were uncomfortable with his antiwar views, and a year later he was let go from the University of Toledo for the same reasons. Options narrowing, Scott joined the Socialist Party in 1917 and took a post at the Rand School of Social Science in New York City, where he became a radical in earnest. It was there he wrote a pamphlet called The Great Madness, which argued that capitalism and big business, hand in hand with the government, encouraged and profited from war, using it to protect and further investments “in the name of liberty.” Scott was arrested and put on trial along with the Socialist Party, charged with attempting to obstruct the draft under the Espionage Act, a piece of legislation similar to today’s Patriot Act. In a very public and controversial trial Scott defended himself and was acquitted of the charges, but his career was in ruins.
“Thus began my education at the College of Hard Knocks,” he liked to say. He traveled abroad and in 1927, after visiting China and Russia, put in an application for membership in the Communist Party. This was before the age of McCarthyism, when the U.S. Communist Party was gaining numbers—opposed as it was to the threat of fascism. It was the volatile time later portrayed in Warren Beatty’s 1981 movie Reds, in which an aged Scott would appear as one of the real-life “witnesses.” Scott eventually resigned from the party when a pamphlet of his was rejected because it didn’t align with Leninist thinking. The party was angered enough not to accept his resignation, instead expelling Scott for his individualism.
It would be individualism, and his union with Helen in 1928, that defined the rest of his life. In Helen, he found a woman who was both a helper and an equal. Though their relationship was at first tempered by the age difference, they formed a remarkable liaison. The conservative world of the Great Depression settled in on them, leaving Scott few outlets for his views, as the media was controlled by the very forces of financial power he sought to expose. Helen and Scott chose instead to shrug the weight of public life from their shoulders and move to an abandoned farm in Vermont in 1932 to start their rural experiment. Thirteen years later, on Scott’s sixty-second birthday, August 6, 1945, President Truman gave the order to drop the first atom bomb on Hiroshima.
“Your government is no longer mine,” Scott wrote to the president in objection. Then in 1952, when Vermont became popular with skiers and city vacationers, the Nearings