Lewis Corey
A Portrait of an American Radical
 

DAVID E. AFTER
 

IKNEA\' Lewis Corey near the end of his turbulent career.
He was teaching political economy at Antioch College
when I arrived as part of the "veterans' generation" which
engulfed the college. Eager, ambitious, and anxious to make up
for time lost and ideas postponed, we were, I should say, a deter¬
mined lot about the business of education. Corey had a remarkable
effect on many of us. Those interested in the social sciences came
into direct contact with his dynamism. He had been a part of the
most powerful moral and ideological convolution America had
experienced since the Civil War, the Marxian radical movement.
In that sense he was our intellectual predecessor. As such he
remained a figure of historic importance. No taint of nmstiness
surrounded him—he was brimming with ideas. He remained the
humanist and the rationalist in a post^var world which abounded
in good sense but small inspiration. In the years in which I knew
Lewis Corey, from 1946 until his death a decade later, the man
I knew was an artist and moralist. He was an artist who was deeply
and consciously concerned with human drama.

He began as a protege of Daniel De Leon. He was largely self-
educated. De Leon had advised him against higher education.
Corey's education came from books and from activism. He was
a philosophical radical in his teens and a professional revolution¬
ary in his twenties. Long before the clumsy emphasis upon "inter¬
disciplinary" views of human action had come into vogue, Corey
was concerned with almost every aspect of social experience as
a just concern. Before he had turned twenty, he had written on
cubism and futurism as artistic and philosophical movements.