Everett Dean Martin

Everett Dean Martin (July 5, 1880 – May 10, 1941) was an American minister, writer, journalist, instructor, lecturer, social psychologist, social philosopher, and an advocate of adult education. He was an instructor and lecturer at The New School for Social Research in New York City from 1921 to 1929, and served on the board of directors of The New School from 1925 to 1932. He was the final director of the People's Institute of Cooper Union in New York City from 1922 to 1934. Martin was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, on July 5, 1880. Graduating with honors at the age of 24 from Illinois College in Jacksonville, he moved on to Chicago, attending McCormick Theological Seminary from 1904 until his ordination as a Congregational Minister in 1907. Martin received a Litt.D. (Doctor of Letters) degree from Illinois College in 1907. He was best known for his advocacy of the liberal education of adults, which he saw as "an antidote to both the irrationality of the crowd and the power of propaganda."

In 1907, he married Esther W. Kirk of Jacksonville, Illinois. They had three children: Mary, Margaret, and Elizabeth.

From 1906 to 1908, Martin was pastor of the First Congregational Church (The First Church of Lombard) of Lombard, Illinois. From 1908 to 1911, Martin was pastor of the People's Church in Dixon, Illinois. Martin was minister of the First Unitarian Church of Des Moines, Iowa, 1911–1915

Martin was a featured columnist for the Des Moines Register during the years 1914–1915.

In 1915, his successful life took a radical shift in course. He divorced his wife of eight years and left the professional ministry. He moved to New York and began writing for the New York Globe. Over the next 20 years, Martin developed into a successful writer and forged a national reputation as a charismatic public lecturer, often attracting a crowd of a thousand or more at the People's Institute, a major center for adult education in New York City. Martin's second marriage in 1915 to Persis Eastman Rowell also ended in divorce, they had one son, Everett Eastman Martin.

In The Behavior of Crowds (1920), his first nationally reviewed book, he posed what he saw as the dilemma of the modern age: a technological information revolution that made it possible, in the absence of an adequate educational system, to influence ignorant men and women with propaganda and half-truths. Unscrupulous demagogues, corrupt politicians, manipulative advertisers, and revolutionary ideologues found ready-made audiences when they appealed to the baser (a subconscious urge, behavior, or intuition directed by primeval, animalistic, self-serving, and/or ignoble motivations) instincts.

Martin was a classical, individualistic liberal, in the tradition of the Renaissance humanists and the authors of The Federalist Papers. He believed in restrained government and in the self-selection of intellectually promising students through appropriate programs of adult education.

His most famous and widely read work, The Meaning of a Liberal Education, appeared in 1926, the same year he helped found the American Association for Adult Education. When his book, The Meaning of a Liberal Education was released in 1926, Frederick Paul Keppel, the president of the Carnegie Corporation proclaimed it as "the most important contribution to the understanding of adult education… this far in the United States." In March 1928, John Dewey responded to a request from Marie Mattingly Meloney, editor of the New York Herald-Tribune Sunday Magazine, and offered his recommendations on recently published texts on education. Dewey wrote, "I think the best educational books of recent publication are…Martin, The Meaning of a Liberal Education. This was not the first time Dewey recommended Everett Dean Martin's book. In 1927, the editors of the Journal of the National Education Association approached Dewey and asked, "What book have you recently found especially worthwhile? Something that you have read easily, eagerly, and with profit, either in the field of education or out of it." Dewey identified two books; one of them was Martin's The Meaning of a Liberal Education.