Dr. Lindley Miller Keasbey

Born: 24 February 1867 in Newark, New Jersey.

Died: 17 September 1946 in Whittier, California.

Lindley Miller Keasbey, teacher, scholar, and activist, was born on 24 February 1867, in Newark, New Jersey, the son of wealthy and aristocratic Anthony Quinton and Edwina Louisa (Miller) Keasbey. His father, a successful lawyer, had been appointed by President Abraham Lincoln as the United States Attorney for New Jersey, where he served from 1861 to 1886.

Keasbey received his early education at Newark Academy and St. John's Military Academy. He graduated from Harvard with the class of 1888, then attended graduate school at the Columbia Law School and School of Political Science, earning an M.A. in 1889 and a Ph.D. the following year. He earned all these degrees with honors. Then he traveled to Germany and studied at Berlin and Strassbourg. It was while in Germany that Keasbey became acquainted with the work of Achille Loria and the Free Land Theory, a connection that would prove very important later in his life.

After returning to the states, Keasbey in 1892 married Cornelia Simrall of Louisville, Kentucky, and soon thereafter he took his first teaching job at the University of Colorado. While there he published The Nicaragua Canal and the Monroe Doctrine (1896), first in German and then in English, and several articles on key issues of the day, including monetary policy. It was while he was in Colorado that his two daughters were born, and it was there also that he became friends with the future president Woodrow Wilson, who spent a summer teaching there. From this friendship came Keasbey's appointment at Bryn Mawr when Wilson left for Princeton.

At Bryn Mawr Keasbey translated into English Achille Loria's Economic Foundations of Society, publishing it in 1899. This work included the free land theory, the central idea of which was that profits are made solely from the suppression of free land. After several successful years at Bryn Mawr and several more books, Keasbey in 1905 accepted an invitation to move to the University of Texas as head of the political science department. There he became very popular with the students and helped them start the Economic and Political Science Association.

All went smoothly until 1908, when a former student told someone in Dallas that Keasbey was a socialist. A letter was written to governor Thomas M. Campbell concerning Keasbey's alleged socialist leanings; the letter was passed to David F. Houston, president of UT, and then to Thomas S. Henderson, chairman of the board of regents. Keasbey denied that he was teaching socialism, but refused to comment on his outside activities. Houston told the board that Keasbey was a revolutionary socialist, but that the students greatly admired him and considered him their favorite professor.

In June 1909 Lindley Keasbey was removed from his position in political science and made head of the newly created Institutional History Department. It was in this role that Keasbey came into contact with a young farm boy seeking an education, Walter Prescott Webb. Webb took two classes from Keasbey, and claimed that he was the best professor he ever had and that he learned more from Keasbey than from all of his other professors combined. Webb would later mention Keasbey's influence in his inaugural address to the American Historical Association. Keasbey remained a popular figure on campus and was even considered a candidate for the presidency of the university in 1915. This related mostly to his relationship with Governor James Edward Ferguson through his program for tenant farmers and the rumor that he wrote some of the governor's speeches.

In 1916 Professor Keasby visited Aleister Crowley from 15 through 18 September at Adams Cottage on Newfound Lake in New Hampshire. Crowley was planning to visit Austin, Texas in November, and with Professor Keasby's assistance, establish a chapter of the O.T.O. in Austin. Neither the trip to Austin nor the O.T.O. chapter came to pass although Keasby's interest in the O.T.O. prompted Crowley to write an epistle addressed to him outlining the Order's progressive ideals, 'Liber 161, The Law of Thelema.'

However, as World War I began, Keasbey joined the antiwar side of the conflict. While many of his friends ended up in President Wilson's administration, Keasbey did not, and in 1917 he left his wife and home quite suddenly and went north to join the peace movement. He had been active with the Emergency Peace Federation from 1915 to 1917 and opposed American military intervention, but after the United States joined the war in 1917, Keasbey and his fellow activists felt the need for a new organization.

He helped in organizing the People's Council of America, one of the more radical antiwar groups, and began speaking at rallies on their behalf. The regents of the University of Texas, embittered in the Ferguson budget controversy, asked Keasbey to defend himself before the regents for his activities with the People's Council. Keasbey refused, saying that he would have the People's Council send a list of their aims to the regents. So, on July 12, 1917, the regents voted unanimously to remove him in the best interests of the university. They gave no public reason, simply adding his name to the list of anti-Ferguson professors that were fired. This situation led to Roy Bedichek's later statement that when the issue of academic freedom came up it was always the most brilliant professors who were fired first.

Keasbey was never reinstated to the faculty. He and his wife were separated for a year while he looked for work in New York and a business venture failed. This business venture was Keasbey's purchase of the magazine The International from George Sylvester Viereck. Keasbey's venture with the magazine only lasted with the May 1918 issue before the magazine folded. Prior to Professor Keasbey's purchase of The International its editorship had been the responsibility of Aleister Crowley who had been using the magazine to promote his own writings and occult views. Crowley's Confessions has the following to say about Keasbey and The International incident:

Keasbey had been professor of institutional history in the University of Austin, Texas. He was a charming and cultured man, but full of cranky notions about socialism, which he held with arrogant obstinacy. His literary style, on which he prided himself, as would have been ridiculous in Ruskin or Walter Pater, was turgid, convoluted, incoherent, over-loaded, redundant and beyond the wit of the most earnest and expert reader to comprehend. He was not far behind William Howell Williams, elsewhere mentioned, in his power to baffle inquiries. Frank Harris agreed on this point, no less than all the other people to whom I put it. He told me with amazement that he had been badgered into printing a half-page article of Keasbey's in Pearson's, of which he was then treasurer, able, therefore, to put pressure on the editor. This number came under the censure of Burleon. He had gone to Washington to justify himself. Burleon had shown him the copy which had been submitted to the censors. Keasbey's article was marked as objectionable by all three pencils. Harris exploded. “You can't understand it,” he raged. “I can't understand it. I don't believe there's any man alive who could make head or tail of a single sentence. How can it do any harm?”

Keasbey's social opinions had cost him his chair at Austin. He had read and admired some of my work, and sought me out in my cottage by Lake Pasquaney. We spent three delightful days without even stopping talking, bar odd snatches of sleep. In conversation, he was delightful, breezy and instructive. Our acquaintance had ripened into something like friendship. He behaved very strangely in this matter of The International. He professed the warmest friendship for me, spent sometime almost every day in my office chatting; we lunched and dined together quite often, but he never breathed one word of his intention to buy The International, and when the transaction became public, he went one better. He asked me to continue my contributions and even suggested that I should work jointly with him, yet all the time, his idea was to oust me altogether. He refused to print a single line from my pen, and that, although he was in despair about filling the number. He must too have known that the success of the paper was entirely due to my personality; he knew that I had written nearly everything myself, and that the only other important elements had been given to me by their authors purely as a token of their personal admiration and friendship for me. I suppose he was utterly blinded by his conceit, which he possessed to a degree to which I can recall no parallel. However that may be, the result was that the May number was a monument of incomprehensible, worthless and unreadable rubbish, and that he found himself in his brand new and portentous offices, monarch of all he surveyed, with his overlaid infant a corpse at his feet. The episode is excellently mirthful.

Crowley later dedicated his "Concerning the Law of Thelema" from the 21 March 1919 Equinox Vol. III, No. 1  to Professor Keasbey with the following:

"An Epistle written to Professor L—B—K—who also himself waited for the New Æon, concerning the O.T.O. and its solution of divers problems of Human Society, particularly those concerning Property, and now reprinted for General Circulation."

Professor Keasbey grew ill and rejoined his wife, moving to Tucson, Arizona, in 1925 for health reasons. After partially regaining his health, he began raising dogs, achieving national recognition for his Catalina Kennels. While in Arizona, he converted to Catholicism and became a regular attender of Mass. This new emphasis in his life may partly explain the work Three Worlds in One, which he described to Webb in a letter dated 10 October 1931. In the letter he stated that he felt that the things he taught were superficial and did not answer the why and whither, only the when, where, and how. He wrote that the answer to all these things is contained in his Three Worlds in One, which is full of religious, philosophical, and musical references to the number three; the Trinity, major and minor thirds, and other things.

He lived in Tucson until 1944, leaving after his daughter Cornelia Simrall Allerdice and her small son were killed in a New Year's Eve fire. He and his wife moved to Whittier, California, to be close to their younger daughter. Lindley M. Keasbey died on 17 September 1946, in Whittier. His papers were given to the University of Texas in the mid-1970s by his daughter at the request of Mazie Mathews, who was writing a master's thesis on Keasbey. The papers are housed in the University of Texas archives at the Center for American History.