Priscilla Robertson
From Philosopedia
Robertson, Priscilla Smith (1910 - 26 November 1989)
A historian, civil libertarian, and scientific as well as humanities humanist, Priscilla Robertson was editor of The Humanist in the 1950s, that magazine's "Golden Age," according to numbers of intellectuals who wrote about, subscribed to, and contributed to the quarterly and its causes.
When she and Corliss Lamont had a tiff over her rights as an editor to, or not to, publish one of his articles, the board of directors of the American Humanist Association dismissed her. As described by philosopher Harold A. Larrabee at the time (2 March 1959),
- In a ruthless and even brutal exercise of majority power by the AHA Board of Directors . . . Priscilla Robertson was dismissed as Editor and Gerald Wendt was appointed to replace her on a caretaker basis. . . . It became quite apparent that a narrow majority of the Directors were strongly opposed to the way in which the magazine has attempted to challenge its readers with new ideas for the Humanism of the future, and prefer to flog the dead horses of past controversial issues in a sectarian spirit.
As a consequence, the magazine's staff (including Vassar's English Department Chairman Helen Lockwood, Ethical Culture leader Jerome Nathanson, book review editor Warren Allen Smith) resigned en masse to show their support for her. She never again was active as a humanist, despite encouragement from a group of intellectuals in Taminent. Sidney Hook and a number of other writers vowed never again to submit articles to the magazine. She did, however, chair the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union during a particularly active time for civil-rights cases.
Robertson was the only child of historian Preservèd Smith (1880-1941), the Cornell historian of note who amused scholars by writing a work about theophagy (the eating of God, or communion). A heretic like her father, she wrote Revolutions of 1848: A Social History (1952), which was described by Crane Brinton in The New York Times as
- in the best tradition of what, in a word perhaps significantly beginning to be overworked, we must call humanism.
For Lewis Farm: A New England Saga (1950), a book in which she described how her father built a house in New England in which the family lived, Robertson received a 1956 award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
In An Experience of Women (1982), about the new woman on the eve of the twentieth century, she stressed the cross-cultural relationships of female life in nineteenth-century Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.
Robertson's husband, Cary Robertson, was the longtime Sunday editor of The Louisville Courier-Journal. She died of a stroke at Humana Hospital-Suburban in Louisville and was survived by a daughter, Charlotte, of Berkeley, California; and two sons, Cary Jr. and Henry of Lexington, Kentucky.
The Humanist carried no obituary following its former editor's stroke in 1989, although the then editor Lloyd Morain knew of her death. Meanwhile, Free Inquiry described her extensive contributions to the humanist movement, and eminent humanists went on record as to her massive efforts upon behalf of humanism. The New York Times reported that she died following a stroke.
