Social and Political Activism
As a major advocate for academic freedom, in 1935 Dewey, together with Albert Einstein and Alvin Johnson, became a member of the United States section of the International League for Academic Freedom, and in 1940, together with Horace M Kallen, edited a series of articles related to the infamous Bertrand Russell Case.
As well as being active in defending the independence of teachers, and opposing a communist takeover of the New York Teachers' Union, Dewey was involved in the organization that eventually became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
He was an avid supporter of Henry George's proposal for taxing land values. Of George, he wrote, "No man, no graduate of a higher educational institution, has a right to regard himself as an educated man in social thought unless he has some first-hand acquaintance with the theoretical contribution of this great American thinker." As honorary president of the Henry George School of Social Science, he wrote a letter to Henry Ford urging him to support the school.
He directed the famous Dewey Commission held in Mexico in 1937, which cleared Leon Trotsky of the charges made against him by Joseph Stalin, and marched for women's rights, among many other causes.
In 1950, Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to act as honorary chairmen of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.
Read more about this topic: John Dewey
Famous quotes containing the words social and, social and/or political:
“I am heartily tired of this life of bondage, responsibility, and toil. I wish it was at an end.... We are both physically very healthy.... Our tempers are cheerful. We are social and popular. But it is one of our greatest comforts that the pledge not to take a second term relieves us from considering it. That was a lucky thing. It is a reform—or rather a precedent for a reform, which will be valuable.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Throughout the 1980’s, we did hear too much about individual gain and the ethos of selfishness and greed. We did not hear enough about how to be a good member of a community, to define the common good and to repair the social contract. And we also found that while prosperity does not trickle down from the most powerful to the rest of us, all too often indifference and even intolerance do.”
—Hillary Rodham Clinton (b. 1947)
“My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes discuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel—not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses.”
—Clara Barton (1821–1912)