Herron, George Davis, 1862-1925

Congregational minister, educator, journalist, and socialist. One of the prime movers in founding the Rand School of Social Science.

American clergyman and lecturer; unofficial adviser to President Woodrow Wilson.

One of the prime movers in the founding of the Rand School of Social Science was a Christian Socialist minister named George D. Herron (1862-1925). After attending Ripon College in Wisconsin, Herron served as pastor of the Congregational Church in Lake City, Minnesota, and the First Congregational Church in Burlington, Iowa. In 1890 he rose to prominence after delivering the address, "The Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth," to the Minnesota Congregational Club, identifying himself with the emerging Social Gospel movement, of which he was to become a leader. On of his parishioners was Mrs. E.D. Rand, who became close friends with Herron and in 1893 endowed for him a chair of Applied Christianity at Iowa College, now Grinnell College. Herron served on the faculty until 1900 when differences with university officials over his national advocacy of the social gospel led to his resignation.

Upon leaving the university, Herron worked to unify various socialist groupings into the Socialist Party, founded in 1901, and he was subsequently the author of the Party’s 1904 platform. Also in 1901, he divorced his wife and married the daughter of Mrs. E.D. Rand, Carrie Rand, principal of women at Iowa College, and along with her mother, a philanthropist dedicated to progressive causes. Mrs. E.D. Rand, who died in 1905, established a trust fund for causes dear to her, used by trustees Carrie (Rand) Herron and Morris Hillquit, a leader of the Socialist Party, to establish the Rand School of Social Science, so-named in her honor.

Adverse public reaction to George D. Herron’s divorce and his subsequent remarriage to Carrie Rand Herron had led the couple to move to Florence, Italy, where Carrie raised their two children and where she died in 1914, while Herron pursued an active writing and public speaking career until his death in 1925. With the outbreak of World War I, Herron broke with the pacifist wing of the socialist movement and relocated to Geneva because Switzerland was not a combatant state. He soon became employed by the U.S. State Department as a secret negotiator and an unofficial diplomatic adviser, keeping in close contact with British and American foreign offices. He worked with Colonel House, President Wilson’s close adviser, in Paris during the negotiations that led to the Versailles Treaty, and was one of the two Americans appointed by Wilson as delegates to the Prinkipo conference.