Harry Allen Overstreet

Harry Allen Overstreet (born October 25, 1875, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died August 17, 1970, Falls Church, Virginia) was an American social psychologist and a staunch advocate of an informed citizenry. He dedicated much of his career to educating adults on social, psychological, and political subjects through lectures and books.

Overstreet received degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1899 and Balliol College, Oxford, in 1901. He married Elsie Lucy Burr in 1907, and they had three sons. He taught philosophy at Berkeley for 10 years before joining the faculty of the City College of New York in 1911, where he became head of the philosophy department. In 1924 he began also teaching night courses at the New School for Social Research (now the New School). He remained at City College until his retirement in 1939.

Overstreet wrote several books in which he collected his New School lectures, such as Influencing Human Behavior (1925), in which he discussed how techniques from the comparatively new discipline of psychology could be used to change people’s actions. In About Ourselves: Psychology for Normal People (1927), Overstreet wrote about psychological “malformations” that could occur in ordinary individuals and how they could be overcome. He explored a more philosophical vein in The Enduring Quest: A Search for a Philosophy of Life (1931), which concerned making sense of existence in a time of scientific and social change. In We Move in New Directions (1933), Overstreet considered what would replace what he called the “profit-economy” and its attendant waste.

In 1932 Overstreet divorced Elsie Burr and married Bonaro Wilkinson, who became his collaborator. She was a writer on psychology and education in her own right as well as being a poet. Their first book together was Town Meeting Comes to Town (1938), about the Town Hall lecture and performance space in New York City and its associated radio program America’s Town Meeting of the Air.

In Overstreet’s book Our Free Minds (1941), he argued that adults’ fading memories of their social studies lessons was “the gravest problem of our democracy.” His best-selling book The Mature Mind (1949) explained, in layman’s terms, psychological and psychiatric techniques and their relationship to social interaction. It was a finalist for the National Book Award.

In collaboration with his wife, Overstreet followed this book with The Mind Alive (1954) and The Mind Goes Forth: The Drama of Understanding (1956). Their later books took a political turn, beginning with several about communism, including What We Must Know About Communism (1958), The War Called Peace: Khrushchev’s Communism (1961), and The Iron Curtain: Where Freedom’s Offensive Begins (1963). They discussed the John Birch Society and other ultraconservative groups in The Strange Tactics of Extremism (1964). Their final book was The FBI in Our Open Society (1969), which defended the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and its director J. Edgar Hoover against their critics.