February 3, 1970

Bertrand Russell Is Dead; British Philosopher, 97

By ALDEN WHITMAN

ONDON, Tuesday, Feb. 3-- Earl Russell, the philosopher and mathematician, died at his home in Wales last night. He was 97 years old. The winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1950, Bertrand Russell was best known in recent years for his campaign against war, nuclear bombs and racial discrimination.

Advancing years did not diminish Lord Russell's fervor. In December he appealed to Secretary General U Thant of the United Nations to support an international war crimes commission to investigate alleged "torture and genocide" by the Americans in South Vietnam.

He was at his home in Penrhyndeudraeth in Merionetshire when he died at 8 P.M. He had been suffering from influenza.

Governed by 3 Passions

"Three passions, simple but strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."

In those words Bertrand Arthur William Russell, the third Earl Russell, described the motive forces of his extraordinarily long, provocative and complex life. But only one yearning, that for love, was fully satisfied, he said, and only when he was 80 and married his fourth wife, Edith Finch, then a 52-year-old American.

Of his search for knowledge, he reflected, "a little of this, but not much, I have achieved." And as for pity:

"Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden for their sons and a whole world of loneliness, poverty and pain made a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer."

Russell's self-assessment scanted his lifelong passionate skepticism, which provided the basis for his intellectual stature. Possessing a mind of dazzling brilliance, he made significant contributions to mathematics and philosophy for which, alone, he would have been renowned. Two works, "The Principles of Mathematics" and "Principia Mathematica," both published before World War I, helped to determine the direction of modern philosophy. Russell's name, as a result, was linked with those of such titans of thought as Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Nobel Prize Winner

Largely for his role as a philosopher, Russell received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. A year earlier, he had been named by King George VI to the Order of Merit, whose British membership is limited to 24 persons. These honors cast into strange relief the fact that in 1940 a New York State Supreme Court justice ruled him unfit to teach at City College.

Unlike some generative thinkers, Russell epitomized the philosopher as a public figure. He was the Voltaire of his time, but lacking in the Sage of Fernay's malice. From the beginning to the end of his active life, Russell engaged himself with faunlike zest in the great issues of the day-- pacifism, rights for women, civil liberty, trial marriage, new methods of education, Communism, the nuclear peril and war and peace-- for he was at bottom a moralist and a humanist. He set forth his views on moral and ethical matters in such limpidly written books as "Marriage and Morals," "Education and the Social Order" and "Human Society in Ethics and Politics."

He posed awkward questions and gave answers that some regarded as less than commonsensical. However, from his first imprisonment (as a pacifist in World War I) to his last huzza of dissent (as a Zola-like accuser of the United States for its involvement in Vietnam), he scorned easy popularity and comfortable platitudes. He was, indeed, untamable, for he had a profound faith in the ultimate triumph of rationality, which he was certain he represented in an undidactic fashion.

"I don't think, taking it generally, that I have a dogmatic temperament," he insisted. "I am very skeptical about most things and I think that skepticism in me is deeper than positive statements. But, of course, if you get into propaganda you have to make positive statements."

His active involvement in causes (and the scores of positive declarations he made in their behalf) earned him a good deal of abuse and even ridicule. "England's wisest fool" was what his deriders said.

Stand on Vietnam

Some of the severest criticism was directed at Russell for his condemnation of United States policy in Vietnam and for his attempts to show this country guilty of crimes against humanity there. Oddly, the criticism came not only from war partisans but also from the Soviet Union, a professed ally of North Vietnam, which Russell believed lacked staunchness because it was under the thumb of the United States.

His vitriolic stand on Vietnam stemmed from concern over the possibility of nuclear war. Although he had once suggested the threat of a preventative nuclear war to impose disarmament on the Soviet Union, his views sobered in the mid-fifties and through the Committee of 100 in Britain he strove to arouse mass opposition to atomic weaponry. For his part in a London demonstration in 1961 he went unrepentantly to jail. He was 89 at the time.

Later, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, he dispatched letters to President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, bidding them hold summit talks to avert war. Although he was curtly rebuffed by Mr. Kennedy, Russell was convinced that he had been instrumental in settling the dispute peacefully. "Unarmed Victory," published in 1963, contained this correspondence as well as letters he addressed to U Thant, Jawaharlal Nehru and Chou En-lai, among others, about the Chinese-Indian border conflict, for the settlement of which he also took some credit.

No Communist ("I dislike Communism because it is undemocratic and capitalism because it favors exploitation"), Russell was a relentless critic of the Soviet Union until after the death of Stalin in 1953. He then softened his attitude because he considered the post-Stalin leadership more amenable to world peace. But in the Vietnam conflict he was certain that the United States acted from sinister economic and political motives-- a grasping for Southeast Asian raw materials and an itching for war with China.

Russell took the position that the United States, "the excessive power in the world," had escalated the war for which it bore "total responsibility." He compared American actions to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, French terror in Algeria and Soviet suppression in Hungary.

"Whatever happens," he told a visitor in his wafer-thin voice in the spring of 1967, "I cannot be a silent witness to murder or torture. Anyone who is a partner in this is a despicable individual. I am sorry I cannot be moderate about it...

"What I hope is that the Americans will arouse so much opposition that in their own minds they will start to think that it is not worth the trouble." Convinced by data collected for him in Vietnam that the United States was committing war crimes, Russell organized and helped finance a mock trial of this country's leaders. The War Crimes Tribunal, presided over by Jean-Paul Sartre and Isaac Deutscher, met in Stockholm in May, 1967, and issued a detailed indictment of United States military procedures. Although the State Department discounted the testimony adduced by the tribunal, Russell was impressed by the evidence. The tribunal, in the end, caused only a minor stir, in part because the Communist press in Europe boycotted its proceedings.

Russell later denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. But he also criticized Czechoslovak leaders for what he termed compromising with the occupiers.

Because of the stridency of his views, some charged that Russell was senile and a dupe of one of his secretaries, Ralph Schoenman, who was also secretary of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and active in the War Crimes Tribunal. Dispassionate reporters who traveled to Russell's home overlooking the winding Glaslyn River at Penrhyndeudraeth, Wales, found the frail philosopher very much alert. As to Mr. Schoenman, he said, "You know he is a rather rash young man, and I have to restrain him."

Last December, Russell disavowed any connection with Mr. Schoenman after the former secretary announced an investigation by the American branch of the Peace Foundation into alleged atrocities by American soldiers in Vietnam. Russell said Mr. Schoenman, an American, had not been his secretary for more than three years.

A gentle, even shy man, Russell was delightful as a conversationalist, companion and friend. He was capable of a pyrotechnical display of wit, erudition and curiosity, and he bubbled with anecdotes about the world's greats. Despite his title, he was "Bertie" to one and all. His charm, plus his assured position in the upper reaches of the British aristocracy, created for him a worldwide circle of friends. They were a heterogeneous lot, ranging over the years from Tennyson to Graham Greene to Mr. Sartre.

Friends included philosophers such as Whitehead and Wittgenstein; Niels Bohr and Max Born; writers such as P. G. Wodehouse, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, George Bernard Shaw, Maxim Gorky and H. G. Wells; and political figures such as Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, Lenin and Trotsky. They numbered in the hundreds, and Russell maintained a lively correspondence with them. Someone calculated, in fact, that he wrote one letter for every 30 hours of his life.

As a young man, gaunt and black-haired, Russell favored a flowing mustache and high starched collars. In his autumnal years, his spareness became frailty and, mustache discarded, he resembled a frost-famished sparrow. His glittering eyes and half-smile, combined with a shock of white hair, gave him the appearance of a sage, at once remote and kindly. It was a visage cartoonists delighted to draw.

Baffled by Light Bulb

Although he wrote a book about the mysteries of relativity, he humorously admitted that he could not change a light bulb or understand the workings of an automobile engine. However, he had a reason for everything. William Jovanovich, the American publisher, recalled that as a Harvard student he ate in a cafeteria where the food was cheap and not very good.

"I would sit at a long public table where on many occasions also sat the philosopher Bertrand Russell," Mr. Jovanovich said. "One day I could not contain my curiosity. 'Mr. Russell,' I said, 'I know why I eat here. It is because I am poor. But why do you eat here?' 'Because,' he said, 'I am never interrupted.'"

In his last years Russell lived mostly on liquids-- a food concentrate, soups, puddings, tea and seven double Red Hackle Scotches a day-- because an intestinal kink had been discovered when he was in his 80's and surgery was inadvisable.

He told a visitor that he had started drinking Scotch as a pacifist in World War I. "King George V took the pledge because he thought he could save money and use the money to kill Germans, so I drank," he explained with a twinkle.

The philosopher's eccentricity, or, as he would have it, his independence of mind, was familial. He was born at Ravenscroft, Monmouthshire, on May 18, 1872. He was the youngest of three children on Lord Amberly and the former Katherine Stanley, daughter of Baron Stanley of Alderly. His paternal grandfather was John Russell, the first Earl, who was twice Prime Minister and a leader in obtaining passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 that liberalized election to the House of Commons.

Father a Free Thinker

One of Bertrand's maternal uncles became a Roman Catholic and a bishop; another became a Moslem and made the pilgrimage to Mecca; a third was a combative agnostic. His mother campaigned for votes for women and was a friend of Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary. His father was a freethinker. Together they shocked society by arranging a menage a trois with the tutor of their elder son.

Bertrand's mother died when he was 2 and his father about a year later. Lord Amberly left the guardianship of his sons (the third child, a daughter, had died) to the tutor and another man, both atheists. The guardianship was broken, however, by Lord John Russell and Bertrand was reared, after his grandfather's death in 1878, by Lady Russell, a woman of strict Puritan moral views.

In the first volume of "The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell," published in 1967, the philosopher candidly disclosed his mixed feelings for his grandmother. He felt that she was overly protective; on the other hand, he admired (and profited from) one of her favorite Bible texts. "Thou shalt not follow a multitude who do evil."

His childhood, as he recalled it, was a lonely one, for most of his companions were adults and he had a succession of Germanic and Swiss governesses. He was rescued, however, by geometry.

"At the age of 11 I began Euclid, with my brother [seven years his senior] as my tutor," he wrote. "This was one of the great events of my life, as dazzling as first love. I had not imagined there was anything so delicious in the world. From that moment until Whitehead and I finished 'Principia Mathematica,' when I was 38, mathematics was my chief interest and my chief source of happiness."

As an adolescent Russell read widely, advanced in mathematics and speculated about religion. At 17 he became convinced that there was no life after death, "but I still believed in God because the 'First Cause' argument appeared to be irrefutable," he wrote, adding:

"At the age of 18, however, I read Mill's 'Authobiography,' where I found a sentence to the effect that his father taught him that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered since it immediately suggests the further question 'Who made God?' This led me to abandon the 'First Cause' argument and to become an atheist."

Russell's "Autobiography" recites in detail the painful intellectual struggle that he waged with himself over theology, in the course of which he wrote out in his journal, in Greek, the argumentation that led to his conclusions.

Entering Trinity College, Cambridge, at 18, Russell was soon in the company of its brightest minds-- G. Lowes Dickenson, G. E. Moore, John Maynard Keyes, Lytton Strachey, Charles Singer, Theodore Davies, John McTaggart and Whitehead. Among them he became less and less solemn while continuing his devotion to philosophy and mathematics. "What I most desired," he said, "was to find some reason for supposing mathematics true."

Graduating with highest honors, he married Alys Pearsall Smith, a pretty American Quaker five years his senior. The marriage lasted from 1894 to 1921, but it was terminated in fact in 1901. "I went out bicycling one afternoon and, suddenly, as I was riding along a country road, I realized that I no longer loved Alys," he recalled. Subsequently, Russell had several love affairs, including a celebrated liaison with the flamboyant Lady Ottoline Morrell and another with Lady Constance Malleson, the actress known professionally as Collette O'Niel. His second marriage, in 1921, was to Dora Winifred Black; his third, to Patricia Helen Spence, in 1936; and his fourth, to Edith Finch, took place 16 years later.

An Important Year

After Russell's first marriage he and his wife traveled on the Continent, where he studied economics and German Social Democracy, and thence to the United States, where he lectured on non-Euclidean geometry at Bryn Mawr College and the Johns Hopkins University. Meanwhile, he became a fellow at Trinity.

The year 1900 was one of the most important of Russell's life. In July he attended an International Congress of Philosophy in Paris and met Giuseppe Peano, an originator of symbolic logic. Russell devoured Peano's works. Recounting his exhilaration, he wrote:

"For years I had been endeavoring to analyze the fundamental notions of mathematics, such as order and cardinal numbers. Suddenly, in the space of a few weeks, I discovered what appeared to be definite answers to the problems which had baffled me for years. And in the course of discovering these answers, I was introducing a new mathematical technique, by which regions formerly abandoned to vagueness of philosophers were conquered for the precision of exact formulae."

In October he sat down to write "The Principles of Mathematics," putting down 200,000 words in three months. With its publication in 1902, he plunged into an eight-year task of elucidating the logical deduction of mathematics that became "Principia Mathematica." Reducing abstractions to paper was a grueling intellectual task. "Every morning I would sit down before a blank sheet of paper," he said. "Throughout the day, with a brief interval for lunch, I would stare at the blank sheet. Often when evening came it was still blank."

As time went on and the agony of effort increased, Russell "often wondered whether I should ever come out of the other end of the tunnel in which I seemed to be." Several times he contemplated suicide, but he persevered. However, he said, "my intellect never quite recovered from the strain."

"I have been ever since definitely less capable of dealing with difficult abstractions than I was before," he said.

"Principia Mathematica," one of the world's great rationalist works, cost Russell and Whitehead, his off-and-on collaborator, 50 pounds each to publish. Despite its complexities, the book took the mystery out of mathematical knowledge and eliminated any connection that might have been supposed to exist between numbers and mysticism.

In the years when Russell was writing his philosophical works, he continued an interest in social problems by participating in the woman suffrage movement and in Fabian Society activities. But he was essentially a don until World War I transformed him into a political animal. In the second volume of his autobiography he said that "I underwent a process of rejuvenation" because of the war.

"It may seem curious that the war should rejuvenate anybody, but in fact it shook me out of my prejudices and made me think afresh on a number of fundamental questions," he wrote, adding:

"It also provided me with a new kind of activity, for which I did not feel the staleness that beset me whenever I tried to return to mathematical logic. I have therefore got into the habit of thinking of myself as a nonsupernatural Faust for whom Mephistopheles was represented by the Great War."

A jingoist in the early stages of the Boer War, Russell later became an anti-imperialist; and in 1914 he was a pacifist, but not a pro-German. He joined the No Conscription Fellowship, delivered a series of rousing pacifist lectures and displayed energy and courage in helping conscientious objectors. He also wrote "War-- The Offspring of Fear," "Principles of Social Recognition" and "Justice in Wartime."

"Of all the evils of the war," he wrote, "the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict."

"Russell was jailed for six months for his utterances. He passed the sentence writing and studying in a comfortable prison cell in Brixton Prison.

His pacifism alienated many of his friends, and in his loneliness he entered into an intense love affair with the actress Collette O'Niel. "Collette's love was a refuge to me, not from cruelty itself, which was inescapable, but from the agonizing pain of realizing that that is what men are," he recalled.

After the war Russell visited the Soviet Union and met Lenin, Trotsky and Gorky. He expressed sympathy for the aims espoused by the Communists, but he also voiced misgivings about Soviet methods. "For my part, the time I spent in Russia was one of increasing nightmare," he wrote in his autobiography. "Cruelty, poverty, suspicion, persecution, formed the very air we breathed. There was a hypocritical pretense of equality, and everybody was called 'tovarisch,' but it was amazing how differently this word could be pronounced according as the person addressed was Lenin or a lazy servant."

Soviet leaders apparently never forgave him for his harsh judgment despite his favorable appraisal of Lenin.

In his twenties, after his second marriage, the Russells established an experimental school, the Beacon Hill School, to promote progressive education. Of the children there Russell wrote:

"We allow them to be rude and use any language they like. If they want to call me or their teachers fools, they call us fools. There is no check on irreverence toward elders or betters."

The school's concepts had a wide influence in Britain and the United States, where they were the foundation for scores of similar institutions and practices.

Became Earl in 1931

In 1931 Russell became the third Earl Russell on the death of his brother, John Francis Stanley Russell, the second Earl. He took the honor lightly.

Two years later his wife Dora, who had borne him two children, announced that her third child had been sired by another man. The couple's divorce suit was a nine-days' wonder in the press. After the decree was granted, Russell married his secretary, and the couple had a child in 1937.

With the rise of Hitler, Russell opposed Nazi methods, but also opposed any steps that might lead to war. His attitude changed in 1939 after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland. In "Unarmed Victory," he explained his shift from pacifism:

"I had hoped until after the time of Munich that the Nazis might be persuaded into not invading other countries. Their invasions proved that this hope was in vain, and at the same time evidence accumulated as to the utterly horrible character of their internal regime.

"The two factors led me reluctantly to the conviction that war against the Nazis was necessary."

Meantime, in 1938, Russell began an extended visit to the United States, teaching first at the University of Chicago and then at the University of California at Los Angeles. He also gave a lecture series at Harvard and in 1940 he received an appointment to teach at tax-supported City College.

The step loosed a storm of protest from politicians now forgotten and from the Right Rev. William T. Manning, a Bishop of the Episcopal Church in New York. The Bishop charged that Russell was "a recognized propagandist against religion and morality and who specifically defends adultery." The registrar of New York County suggested that the philosopher be "tarred and feathered and run out of the country." A city councilman called him a "bum." Among other things that incensed critics was a sentence from "Education and the Social Order" that read:

"I am sure that university life would be better, both intellectually and morally, if most university students had temporary, childless marriages."

Amid guffaws from the intellectual community, State Supreme Court Justice John E. McGeehan vacated the appointment on the ground that Russell was an alien and an advocate of sexual immorality. He said Russell would be occupying "a chair of indecency" at City College."

For a brief period Russell found himself taboo. "Owners of halls refused to let them in if I was to lecture," he recalled in his autobiography (the third volume of which appeared last year), "and if I had appeared anywhere in public, I should probably have been lynched by a Catholic mob, with the full approval of the police." Although he undoubtedly overstated the reaction to himself, Russell did have trouble earning money for a while.

From this situation he was rescued by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the inventor of Argyrol and the millionaire art collector and creator of the Barnes Foundation, who gave him a five-year appointment to lecture on philosophy at his foundation in Merlon, Pa. In the fall of 1940, Russell also gave the William James Lectures at Harvard. In the next four years he spoke at various institutions and put the finishing touches on his "History of Western Philosophy," the main source of his income for many years.

Returning to Britain in 1944, he continued to write and lecture there. In 1948 he gave the first Reith Lecture for the British Broadcasting Corporation. His reputation then, as in former years, was mixed: he was thought to be wise, yet he was ridiculed for uttering his maxims oracularly. He was recognized as a brilliant logician but a deficient politician-- as when he wanted to take advantage of Western atomic superiority to bring the Soviet Union to heel. In this he expressed the belief that he was motivated by a desire for human freedom.

Russell was lecturing at Princeton in 1950 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize "in recognition of his many-sided and significant writings, in which he appeared as the champion of humanity and freedom of thought."

Einstein, also at Princeton, was among the first to offer his congratulations.

Drive Against Nuclear War

Since the middle fifties, Russell devoted most of his seemingly inexhaustible energies to a drive against nuclear war. In taking his stand, he proposed that Britain be neutral in the East-West conflict. He urged the withdrawal of United States nuclear arms from British soil.

"For my part, both as a patriot and as a friend of humanity," he said, "I would wish to see Britain officially neutral. The patriotic argument is very obvious to me. No sensible man would wish to see his country obliterated. And as things stand, so long as Britain remains allied to America, there is a serious threat of extermination without the slightest advantage either to America or to the Western way of life."

In furtherance of his views Russell took part in an anti-nuclear demonstration in London and was arrested for breach of peace. The 89-year-old man was jailed for seven days in Brixton Prison after replying "No, I won't" to a magistrate's request that he pledge himself to good behavior.

Although some thought that Russell meddled in the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the main point of his activity, as conveyed in letters to world leaders, appeared to be that no national objective justified a crisis that might lead to world destruction.

"If people could learn to view nuclear war as a common danger to our species," he wrote, "and not as a danger due solely to the wickedness of the oppressing group, it would be possible to negotiate agreements which would put an end to the common danger."

The philosopher's attitude toward the Vietnam conflict flowed from his desire to advance the cause of world peace, which he saw endangered by "United States imperialism." He believed that a rebuff for the United States, indeed a military defeat, would dampen war fires.

Russell had a rather pixie sense of humor about himself and death, and in 1937 he composed his own obituary as he imagined it might appear in The Times of London. He disclosed his article in an interview in 1959. It read in part:

"In his [Russell's] youth he did work of importance in mathematical logic, but his eccentric attitude toward the first World War revealed a lack of balanced judgment, which increasingly infected his later writings.

"His life, for all its waywardness, had a certain anachronistic consistency, reminiscent of that of the aristocratic rebels of the early 19th century. His principles were curious, but such as they were they governed his actions. In private life, he showed none of the acerbity which marred his writings but was a genial conversationalist, not devoid of human sympathy."

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