Bertrand Russell humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought". Bertrand Russell was born on 18 May 1872 at Ravenscroft, Trellech, Monmouthshire, into an influential and liberal family of the British aristocracy. His parents, Viscount and Viscountess Amberley, were radical for their times. Lord Amberley consented to his wife's affair with their children's tutor, the biologist Douglas Spalding. Both were early advocates of birth control at a time when this was considered scandalous. Lord Amberley was an atheist and his atheism was evident when he asked the philosopher John Stuart Mill to act as Russell's secular godfather. Mill died the year after Russell's birth,
John Dewey in 1937, which cleared Leon Trotsky of the charges made against him by Joseph Stalin, and marched for women's rights, among many other causes. In 1939, John Dewey was elected President of the League for Industrial Democracy, an organization with the goal of educating college students about the labor movement. The Student Branch of the L.I.D. would later become Students for a Democratic Society. In 1950, Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, and Jacques Maritain agreed to act as honorary chairmen of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a false-front anti-communist advocacy group founded that year and funded by the