Pryns (Prynce) Hopkins, pacifist, author, publisher, public figure (1885 -- 1970) | NCP-LA

Prynce Hopkins obtained his BA from Yale, a Master Degree in education from Columbia University and Doctoral Degree from London University in psychology.  He lived in England and France where he owned and ran a school for boys based on Montessori-like methods, from 1921 to England's entrance in the Second World War in 1939. Durining the 1940s while living  in Pasadena, California, aand publishing a socialist journal Freedom and Unity, he lectured on comparative religion at Pomona College, California.

Prynce Hopkins was known for his unorthodox approach to social reforms. His interests in mixing psychology, social reforms and theology resulted in several books, includin Father and Sons (1927), The Psychology of Social Movements; a Psychoanalytic View of Society (1938) and From Gods to Dictators; Psychology of Religions and their Totalitarian Substitutes (1944).

When the United States  entered the First World War in 1917, Prynce Hopkins became a vocal anti-war protester. He worked with anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman for the anti-war organization League for Amnesty of Political Prisoners. When Goldman was imprisoned for her anti-war activities, Hopkins became chairman of the League.

During the same period, he was indicted by a federal Grand July on charges of violating the Espionage Act and arrested. His arrest was based less on spying and more for impeding Army recruiting.

Attending a rally for 600 stiking dockworkers in San Pedro, California in 1923, Hopkins was arrested on what is today known as Liberty Hill with Dinclair, Sinclair's brother-in-law Hunter  Kimbrough and Hugh Hardyman, who attempted to recite  the First Amendment of the Constitutionn.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Pynce and his family sailed for New York in October 1940.

At the outbreak of the Second World War Hopkins returned to his anti-war activities and founded Freedom and Unitiy magazine in Pasadena. The journal published quarterly and it was a vocal political periodical that offered an assortment of medical, social, psychological and pacifist reports to its small, but supportive circle of readers.