Stanwood Cobb

Who was Stanwood Cobb?

Stanwood Cobb was an American educator, author and prominent Bahá'í of the 20th century.

He was born in Newton, Massachusetts to Darius Cobb - a Civil War soldier, artist and descendent of Elder Henry Cobb of the second voyage of the Mayflower - and Eunice Hale - founding president of the Ladies Physiological Institute of Boston and mother of Cobb's four sisters and two other brothers. He studied first at Dartmouth College, where he was valedictorian of his 1903 or 1905 graduating class, and then at Harvard Divinity School, earning an A.M. in philosophy and comparative religion 1910. His thesis work, Communistic Experimental Settlements in the USA observed that every such settlement had failed within a generation because of an inability of communism to get people to subordinate their own desires for the good of the group. In 1919 he married Ida Nayan Whitlam. Cobb was a member of several literary associations and of the Cosmos Club of Washington, D.C..

Cobb lived internationally for some years before settling in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he died.