Melvin Rader

Rader was born on November 8, 1903, in Walla Walla, Washington.[1][2] His parents were Cary Melvin Rader, a lawyer, and Harriet Miller Rader, a teacher, and he had two siblings: Ralph and Martha. When he was a teenager, his father represented a man accused of being a Communist during the Red Scare; his father's conviction in taking the case strongly impacted Rader.[3] He attended the University of Washington, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1925, a masters degree in 1927 and a PhD in English in 1929.[1][3] His studies included the works of John Stuart Mill, Charles William Morris, Karl Marx and Peter Kropotkin. While at university, he was a member of the debate club although he developed glandular tuberculosis and was often ill.[3] While completing his graduate degree, he taught English at the University of Idaho between 1927 and 1928.[2][3] In 1931, his PhD dissertation, titled Presiding Ideas in Wordsworth's Poetry, was published as a book.[1]

After graduation, Rader began teaching at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, as an assistant professor of English. He was at the university between 1929 and 1930, when he returned to the University of Washington as an assistant professor of philosophy.[2][3] He stayed at the university for the rest of his career; he was an associate professor between 1944 and 1948, a professor between 1948 to 1971 and professor emeritus between 1971 and his death in 1981. Rader was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago for the 1944–1945 academic year and at the University of South Florida in spring 1972, and was the Solomon Katz lecturer at the University of Washington in 1980.[1][3] He received a Rockefeller Foundation research grant for the 1948–1949 academic year.[3]

Early in his academic career, Rader focused on the use of aesthetics and philosophy in the poetry of William Wordsworth. In his disseration, he explored Wordsworth's "unsensationistic theory of mind" in contrast to the debates about epistemology at the time. He argued that the self was not primarily associated with senses but instead with the mind, and that this philosophical choice would continue in transcendentalism throughout the nineteenth century in the United States. He published a second analysis of this work in Wordsworth: A Philosophical Approach in 1967.[1]

Rader edited A Modern Book of Aesthetics, which was commonly used as a textbook, and The Enduring Questions. He wrote a number of books throughout his career, including No Compromise: The Conflict Between Two Worlds, Ethics and Society, and Ethics and the Human Community, considering the ethical impact of art.[4][5] He published Art and Human Values (co-written with Bertram Jessup), Marx's Interpretation of History, and The Right to Hope, a collection of social philosophy essays, following his retirement. He was elected president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, president of the American Society for Aesthetics in 1973 and a delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies in 1975.[4]

In 1948, he was accused of being a Communist by the state's Committee on Un-American Activities, known colloquially as the Canwell Committee. Ed Guthman, an investigative reporter for The Seattle Times, received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting of the events, which led to Rader's exoneration.[6][7] He wrote a memoir of his experience with the committee titled False Witness, which was published in 1969.[7] Following the accusation, he renewed his focus on liberal democracy, serving as the president of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for three terms in 1957, 1961 and 1962.[6][7] The state chapter awarded him the ACLU Bill of Rights Award in 1973 and he was actively involved with the organization's prisoner rights committee in Washington.[6]

He helped initiate, and served as a plaintiff in, a lawsuit which went before the United States Supreme Court in 1963 to abolish the loyalty oaths required of faculty at the University of Washington. The case, Baggett v. Bullitt, was successful and set a precedent for other universities across the country.[6][8]

Following a long illness, Rader died on June 14, 1981.[4] In 2009, an endowment fund was created in Rader's name at the University of Washington to fund philosophy students engaged in social justice work.[9]

• (1941). The Root Values of Art. Journal of Philosophy 38 (12):324-332
• (1945). Polarity and Progress. Journal of Philosophy 42 (25):673-683.nd Society. New York: Greenwood Press.
• (1947). Isolationist and Contextualist Esthetics: Conflict and Resolution. Journal of Philosophy 44 (15):393-407.
• (1952). A Modern Book of Esthetics. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• (1953). Crisis and the Spirit of Community. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 27:40 - 58.
• (1956). The Enduring Questions: Main Problems of Philosophy. New York: Holt.
• (1958). The Artist as Outsider. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 16 (3):306-318.
• (1964). Ethics and the Human Community. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
• (1972). Henry A. Alexander & Melvin Rader. In Memoriam: Bertram Jessup. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (2):149-152.
• (1973). Alienation. Social Theory and Practice 2 (3):373-379.
• (1974). Editorial. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 32 (3):319-321.
• (1974). Dickie and Socrates on Definition. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 32 (3):423-424.
• (1974). The Imaginative Mode of Awareness. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (2):131-137.
• (1979) Marx's Interpretation of History: New York, Oxford University Press.
• (1981) The right to hope: crisis and community. University of Washington Press.

• Melvin Rader's papers at the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections