The Bertrand Russell Gallery (original) (raw)

Married in 1921 for the second time, he became the father of two children, a son and a daughter. He and Dora Russell started a model school at Beacon Hill in an attempt to transform education so as to eradicate possessiveness and warlike psychology. To finance this experiment, Russell then often went on fund-raising tours in America -- a society he on the whole respected but also feared for its dogmatic capitalism and popular materialism.

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, as his marriage to Dora broke down and as he lost faith in Beacon Hill, Russell continued to write books intended to emancipate readers from what he saw as the fetters of outmoded religious belief, restrictive marriages, repressed attitudes towards human sexuality and authoritarian education practices. In the realm of politics, Russell persistently criticized the Bolshevik experiment in Russia while analyzing the irrational savagery of Fascism. Along with George Orwell, Russell was one of the few Western intellectuals on the Left not to be seduced by the claims of Marxist theory and Bolshevik practice in Russia, nor was he beguiled by Fascism. Russell retained his beliefs "developed during the Great War" in non-violent resistance to wars until the aggressive expansionism of Hitler in Poland in 1939 compelled him to abandon his peace advocacy. He spent the Second World War in America where he wrote his popular _History of Western Philosophy_but remained unhappy away from a Britain fighting for her life against Hitler.

Russell returned to Britain in 1944, becoming almost an establishment figure after the war in warning of the dangers to civilization posed by Russia developing atomic weapons. These fears of Russia, dating from his 1920 visit, led him before Russia exploded an atom bomb in 1949, to contemplate coercing the Soviets into accepting the international control of atomic energy resources and production. Thereafter, however, Russell began to shift to warning about the danger of nuclear catastrophe whether precipitated by accident, derangement within the Great Powers' leadership or imperialist miscalculation. This fear for civilization led him in the late 1950s and early 1960s into his last great crusade, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). He believed that Britain, by unilateral disarmament, could set an example to the world, leading to gradual Great Power disarmament.

By the late 1960s, not long before his death, Russell turned decisively against the United States. He was convinced that their war in Vietnam was immoral and dangerous to civilization. Some of his last actions were plans to set up a war crimes tribunal in Sweden to try American policy-makers from the Johnson Administration. Such actions turned this man, then in his nineties, into a guru for many of the youth of the 'sixties who looked to him for moral leadership.

Russell's personal life was marred by some unhappy marriages and tragedy for his eldest son. Russell fell out of love with his first wife, the American Quaker Alys Pearsall Smith in 1901, and they separated in 1911, although there was no divorce until 1921 after which he married Dora Black. She bore him two children, John Conrad (1921) and Katharine (1923). John became increasingly ill from his late twenties and in the last years of his life was irrevocably schizophrenic. The marriage ended in mutual and lasting bitterness in the early 1930s. Russell's third marriage, to Patricia Spence, led to the birth of Conrad Russell, now the fifth Earl Russell, a distinguished historian and an active, progressive member of the House of Lords. His last marriage when over eighty, to the American Edith Finch, provided with him much happiness.

Russell in 1911 threw off his inhibitions and began a long affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, throwing aside his puritan upbringing. As their passion waned she became a lifelong confidante. Rebelling against what he saw as Victorian repressiveness, Russell conducted many affairs from 1914 on, arguing for the liberation of men and women from sexual repression. This approach to human relations helps account for his mass popularity not just during the 1960s but earlier. Russell himself believed near the end of his life that the freedoms in personal behaviour that he advocated had some pernicious and unanticipated effects. Yet, to the end he remained an apostle of political and personal freedom against oppression, whether by the state, public opinion or education.