The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly

commentary on russell’s news reports

John Ongley

The Problem of History

These newspaper articles from the New York Times are that paper’s earliest reports on Bertrand Russell. They cover both mundane and important events, but even the most banal clippings provide glimpses of Russell’s fin-de-siecle world in England and America before the war.

The first article, from 1896, is drawn from the society pages of the Times, and lists the notable people staying in New York hotels that day, including Russell and his wife. Note that as well as listing the people themselves, it also lists the very hotel they are staying at. Even by today’s celebrity media standards, this careful attention to the comings and goings of “notables” seems to refute the idea that the cult of celebrity is a recent invention.

Leaping ahead eleven years, the next news articles, from 1907, concern Russell’s run for Parliament that year. Russell was the first person to run on a women’s suffrage ticket in England, and the event was a genuinely newsworthy one. Following this are three articles concerning Russell’s 1914 visit to America and the award of a prize to him by Columbia University in 1915. At this time, Russell is an intellectual celebrity and the articles appeared mainly for that reason.

The next three articles concern Alys Russell’s 1916 visit to America to lecture for the woman’s suffrage movement. As the articles reproduced here show, Alys possessed a bit of celebrity status in her own right – there seems to have been a real interest in her by the press apart from her position as Russell’s wife. The last article, also from 1916, announces Russell’s dismissal from Cambridge University for anti-war activities. It is just the first in a long series of press reports about Russell and the war.

One of the things of interest in these news clippings is the fact that they are so full of (what are now known to be) obvious errors, and even contradictions, as well as containing many assertions that beg further examination and explanation. Such news clippings are part of the historian’s primary data, and these show clearly what the real data of history are like for most historians most of the time – confused and confusing contradictory reports, and other puzzling anomalies.

In most cases, one can tell that the articles contain errors only by comparing one questionable source with other equally questionable ones. Often, looking more carefully at the record will only produce a quagmire of ever more conflicting information and you just pick the most authoritative looking claims, though other times, you are lucky enough to find one version that fits the known facts better than the other versions, and that becomes the “truth”. With that in mind, here is a list of what seem to be the major errors or questionable claims in these newspaper articles, as nearly as can be determined.

The Rats

The biggest whopper in these articles may be in the second article from 1907 (May 12th). It tells a somewhat questionable story of 40 live rats being let loose at Russell’s first public meeting at Wimbledon in his campaign for Parliament there as a woman’s suffrage candidate. According to this report, the flood of rats terrorized the women and effectively broke up the meeting. The article also suggests – with a broad wink to the “fellows” out there – that considerably fewer women attended Russell’s later campaign meetings.

Russell himself supports this version of the story by retelling it in his 1967 Autobiography. There, he not only repeats the story as told in the papers – and in fact, publishes a news account of it in the Autobiography from some paper other than the NYT – but also elaborates on it a little, saying: “At my first meeting, rats were let loose to frighten the ladies, and ladies who were in the plot screamed in pretended terror with a view to disgracing their sex.”[1]

But don’t close the case yet, because Russell tells a quite different story in a letter written to Helen Flexner on June 7th, just three weeks after the incident – whatever it was. In that letter, Russell says “[The campaign] was a funny time – partly horrid, partly amusing. The first meeting was the worst – a huge hall absolutely packed, about half violently hostile, and come only to make a row, whistling, cat-calling, getting up free fights, pretending to have fits, and getting carried out – everything imaginable to make speaking inaudible. The papers averred that rats were let loose, and the myth grew – I never saw them, and no one I asked did, until at last I found a man who said two had been let loose at the very end, and he had seen one dead.”[2]

Yet another version of the events comes from Ray Monk’s recent biography of Russell. While Monk simply repeats the rat story as described in the papers and Russell’s Autobiography, he also asserts that Russell’s meetings were well attended, thus contradicting the newspaper story that attendance at them, at least by women, dwindled after the rat debacle.[3] Since the newspaper’s reported lower attendance mid-campaign, it is unreliable, though it is not clear how much more reliable Monk’s assertion of good attendance at the meetings is, as he does not give his evidence for the claim.

As for the rats, which story should be believed – the one in Russell’s 1907 letter to Helen Flexner or the press accounts of 1907 and Russell’s 1967 Autobiography? Had Russell simply come to repeat the press accounts by 1967 because they made a better story, although the more modest 1907 version he gave in his letter to Helen was closer to the truth? Or did later reflection and further evidence force Russell to admit that the press accounts, which he was not willing at that time to credit, were actually true?

In the same article in which the rat story appears (May 12th), Russell is referred to as a “Liberal” candidate. But as Monk tells it (p. 189), the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies asked Russell to stand for election when the Liberals had declined to even field a candidate at Wimbledon because it was such a strong Tory district. This is also the version told in the May 3rd newspaper report. Griffin elaborates on this view (p. 313), saying that the Liberals gave Russell no official recognition during the campaign. And this last claim is supported by the next newspaper clipping from the Times, of May 16th, which contradicts, or corrects, the previous one, but affirms the one before that, by claiming that “the Liberals declined officially to nominate a candidate for the vacancy”, thus supporting Monk’s and Griffin’s stories. It doesn’t appear as though Russell was a Liberal candidate.

Russell’s American Tour

The next three articles concern Russell’s 1914 trip to America. The first of these (Oct 21, 1913) adds some information to what is already known about the trip, and raises new questions. The article reports that Russell was appointed a “Woodward Lecturer” at the October 20th meeting of Yale’s governing board, without specifying what the responsibilities of a Woodward Lecturer are. Getting a position to teach one or several courses for a term or more is commonly referred to as an “appointment”, so that it sounds as though Russell is being hired for at least a semester, to teach a course or two.

But we know that Russell gave only one lecture at Yale while in America. Moreover, numerous other people who likewise received such Woodward Appointments also only delivered one lecture there that year. It is likely, then, that the Yale appointment announced in the paper was just for the one lecture there that Russell in fact gave.

In a discussion of this article, Jack Clontz has pointed out that the name of one of the lecturers referred to in the Yale announcement is misspelled. It should say that Hastings Rashdall (not Rashall) will also lecture there. Kenneth Blackwell found a copy of the Yale Daily News for May 15, 1914 in the Russell Archive at McMaster University which reports that the title of Russell’s Yale talk was ‘The World of Physics and the World of Sense’. Nicholas Griffin points out that the chronology of vol. 8 of The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell identifies the lecture as essentially the same as Chapter 4 of Our Knowledge of the External World. And Robert Riemenschneider adds that according to Victor Lenzen’s notes from Russell’s 1914 Harvard lectures, Russell made some significant changes in his views on the construction of time (and potentially of space) from those expressed in Our Knowledge of the External World. In particular, Russell no longer treated simultaneity as a primitive relation, but defined it in terms of precedence – roughly, x and y are simultaneous iff x does not precede y and y does not precede x and x does not equal y. These changes were made prior to his Yale lecture, so Russell may have included them in the Yale talk as well. However, when Russell revised Our Knowledge of the External World, for the 1926 English and 1929 American editions, he did not incorporate these changes into the text.[4]

The next of these articles, from March 14, announces Russell’s arrival in the States to lecture at Harvard. It reports Russell saying that he will be there for thirteen months, when he actually planned on staying, and actually did stay, for just three months. For example, he writes in a March 19, 1914 letter to Ottoline Morrell that he plans to depart for Europe on June 6th.[5]

On the same day that the article above was published (March 14th), the Times published a list of all of the notables departing for or arriving from Europe and includes Russell on the list of those arriving on the Mauretania. In his Autobiography, Russell gives this account of the trip: “I sailed on the Mauretania on March 7th. Sir Hugh Bell was on the ship. His wife spent the whole voyage looking for him, or finding him with a pretty girl. Whenever I met him after the sinking of the Lusitania, I found him asserting it was on the Lusitania he had sailed.” Besides its more colorful points of interest, this account confirms that the Times’ spelling of Mauretania was the correct one.[6]

Many of the articles here make reference to Russell’s “American wife” and indicate a certain fascination on the part of the press with this fact. Though Alys’ family was itself notable, and Alys similarly had her own celebrity status, this fascination by the press in Russell having an American wife is no doubt also due to the great interest Americans had marrying their daughters to European aristocrats. Just in the March 14 list of notables arriving from or departing for Europe, one can spot three pairs of mothers and daughters traveling together to or from that continent.

The New York Times article from May 19, 1915 announces an award to Russell from Columbia University for his logical work. Its appearance indicates the extent to which Russell had already become an intellectual celebrity and how quickly Mathematica Principia was recognized as being a major intellectual achievement. The previous three articles, about Russell coming to America and lecturing in 1914, also indicate this, as the trip itself is only newsworthy because it was Russell who has come to lecture.

An Infamous Rector

The next three articles, from March 1916, are about Alys’ visit to New York to speak on woman’s suffrage. The first of these (March 14th) seems to get the date she was to speak wrong, while the second corrects the date but gets the address of the Hall where she was to speak wrong, and only the third article finally gets them both right at once.

Cambridge gave Russell the boot in 1916 for his anti-war activity. That notorious decision is reported in the last of these articles from The New York Times (July 14th). The article refers to Russell as a “rector” who was removed from his “rectorate” at Cambridge, though he was instead a lecturer removed from his lectureship. The article also errs in claiming that Russell had been a visiting lecturer on mathematics and philosophy at Harvard for several years, when he had in fact been a visiting lecturer on logic and theory of knowledge there for only a few months, though in the same paragraph, the writer is now at least calling Russell a lecturer rather than a rector.

Department of Philosophy
Pace University
41 Park Row
New York, NY 10038
ongley@iit.edu

NOTES

[1] The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872-1914, Bertrand Russell. (Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1967, p. 246.)

[2] The letter is published in The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, vol. one, Nicholas Griffin (ed.) (Houghton-Mifflin, Boston, 1992, pp. 313-314.)

[3] Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 1872-1921, Ray Monk. (The Free Press, New York, 1996, pp. 189-190.)

[4] In the internet discussion group russell-l. See Clontz, Blackwell, Griffin, Riemenschneider, and Ongley email messages, Feb 14-16, 2004.

[5] Griffin 1992, p. 497.

[6] Russell 1967, p. 346.

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