John Beecher - Beecher's Later Years

Beecher's Later Years

Beecher alternated college with working in the steel mills until 1925, when he was severely injured while building the Fairfield Sheet Mill near Birmingham. After recuperating, he entered Harvard Graduate School, then began working at a variety of jobs.

John Beecher's adult life suffered turbulence often. After leaving Harvard, Beecher went to teach at Alexander Meiklejohn's Experimental College in Wisconsin, where he earned a master's degree in English, then he pursued graduate studies in sociology at the University of North Carolina, where he worked on Howard Washington Odum's voluminous study of the American South, Southern Regions of the United States, published in 1936. From 1934-1941, he worked with the United States government's Emergency Relief Administration in various states across the South. During World War II, Beecher volunteered and served as a commissioned officer of the interracial crew of the troop transport Booker T. Washington and wrote a book about these experiences, All Brave Sailors. After returning from the war, he was commissioned to write a history of populism in Minnesota; the product was published years later as Tomorrow is a Day.

During the McCarthy era, John Beecher was blacklisted after being fired from his teaching job at San Francisco State University in 1950 for refusing to sign a Levering Loyalty Oath. During the 1950s, Beecher was a rancher and printer, producing privately printed editions and broadsides of his own poetry and a literary magazine called "Morning Star." He also taught at Arizona State University in the late 1950s.

Beecher spent the 1960s primarily as a journalist writing about social injustice, and also as a teacher, while enjoying the renewed prominence of his poetry. As a writer and journalist, he contributed to publications such as The Nation, Ramparts, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The New York Times. In 1967, the California Supreme Court repealed the Levering Act (and in 1977, his firing was overturned and he was reappointed to his teaching position).

As of August 1979, Beecher taught full-time at San Francisco State. He taught classes in Sociology, Writing, Humanities, and American Literature.

John Beecher died of lung disease on 11 May 1980.