Unable to Get Ten Members, Local Fabian Society Ends 45-Year Life

Like the John Reed Club, the Harvard Fabian Society is now defunct.

Unable to obtain the necessary ten signatures for Dean's Office recognition, former President Robert H. Langston '53 expressed "disappointment" over the unwillingness of students to associate themselves with minority organizations and views.

The Society will, however, carry on its program unofficially. "Our most important function now is to undertake a complete rethinking of the socialist position in relation to the economic, political, and social realities of the present-day American scene," said Langston.

The Harvard Fabian Society was originally organized as the Harvard chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society in the first decade of the century. Prominent in the organization then were Walter Lippman '10, and John Reed '10, author of "Ten Days That Shook the World" and immortalized as one of the two Americans buried in the Kremlin.

In its early days and later when it became known as the Harvard Society for Industrial Democracy, the group conceived as its purpose the discussion of the theory and practice of socialism, and bringing the socialist message to the College community. Noted for its doctrinaire and Marxist approach, the Society tended to accept the classical socialist solutions: nationalization of industry as a necessary if not sufficient condition for social progress, and the feeling that war was a necessary concomitant of capitalism.

This last doctrine led the Society to adopt a pacifist stand, and it played an obstreperous part in the thirties.

Since the war, the activities of the Fabian Society have been quieter. This was emphasized when the organization officially became known as the Harvard Fabian Society in January, 1951.