The Ethical Culture movement began in 1876. Its prime mover and leading spirit was Dr. Felix Adler (1851-1933), the son of Rabbi Samuel Adler of New York’s Temple Emanu-El. After graduation from Columbia College in 1870, Felix Adler studied for the rabbinate in Berlin, Germany, and was exposed to the ideas of the “higher critics,” who questioned assumptions about the credibility of biblical scriptures. In addition, Adler studied philosophy (especially that of Immanuel Kant) and economics at the Universities of Berlin and of Heidelberg, from which he earned a Ph. D. in 1873. He was profoundly influenced by Kant’s categorical imperative, a universal law for both private life and political action. Like the Golden Rule, it required one to do what he or she would want everyone else to do in similar circumstances. Adler was also influenced by the German Historical School of economics, which rejected the harsh mechanistic laws of the classical economists and focused on people and reforms to improve their condition.
Although Adler had been slated to succeed his father at Temple Emanu-El, his rejection of traditional Jewish views of God and scriptures were too extreme, even for that liberal congregation. From 1874 to 1876 he taught Hebrew and Oriental literature at Cornell University, but he was at heart a rabbi in need of a congregation. Returning to New York in 1876, Adler fused his spiritual yearnings, Kantian philosophy, and social-reform convictions to found the Society for Ethical Culture, with the motto: “Not by the Creed but by the Deed.” It was a religious society, stressing both the spiritual and the practical, but without any dogma apart from insisting that “the ethical factor,” “the moral element,” be uppermost in personal, social, national, and international relations. Adler observed that theology, dogma, and doctrines, “the so-called duties toward God[,] too often interfere with the proper performance of our duties toward one another.” He admired the moral strength of the Hebrew Prophets, the unselfishness of Buddha, and the ministry of Jesus to the poor and his capacity to cut through the welter of laws to the essence of religion. Indeed, Adler believed that every great religion began as a protest of the formalism of the time. Under Adler’s leadership the Society for Ethical Culture aimed “to stimulate the conscience and. . . awaken an interest in the grave social problems of our day,” which could be solved by “a vigorous exertion of our moral energies.”
A superb speaker, Adler attracted large audiences at the Sunday services of the Society for Ethical Culture. Other societies were established in major American cities and in London, Berlin, and Vienna.
Adler and members of the Society for Ethical Culture were true to their emphasis on deeds over creeds. Although members were involved in a wide variety of reforms, the society’s impact was greatest in EDUCATION and in ameliorating the condition of the poor. In 1877 the society established the first free kindergarten in the United States and in 1880 a workingman’s school, featuring manual training of skilled trades. By 1895 that school had evolved into the Ethical Culture School, and in 1928 it became the Fieldston School. Its broad curriculum featured a mix of activities to develop both skills and moral values, integrated with the study of the arts and sciences.
To aid the poor the Society for Ethical Culture in 1878 helped set up medical dispensaries and nursing services in New York City. Adler also campaigned for better housing for the poor and in 1884 became a member of New York’s Tenement House Commission. He found child labor particularly alarming, and from 1904 to 1921 he was chair of the National Child Labor Commission. The Society for Ethical Culture was also closely identified with the establishment by Stanton Coit, in 1886, of the Neighborhood Guild, New York’s first SETTLEMENT HOUSE. Coit had met Adler in 1881, decided to become an Ethical Culture lecturer, and with Adler’s financial support studied the philosophy of Kant at the University of Berlin, earning a Ph. D. in 1885.
On his return trip to the United States, Coit stopped for three months at London’s Toynbee Hall, the world’s first settlement house. He was inspired by its example of young people of education and means living in a slum, ministering to individuals in a secular setting, and striving for social reforms that would improve a class. Back in New York, Coit, with the blessing of the Society for Ethical Culture, established the Neighborhood Guild. In it Coit tried to avoid paternalism with his democratic idea of organizing groups of a hundred families into guilds to help one another and decide on their needs and what reforms to work for. The guild idea was less successful than the social clubs and kindergarten that were formed. In a year Coit accepted a call to be minister of London’s Society for Ethical Culture. Although he returned briefly to New York, from 1892 to 1894, he settled permanently in England, winning many adherents to the Ethical Culture movement. Coit’s subsequent efforts to develop rituals for the movement led to a break with Adler, but his major American legacy, the Neighborhood Guild, renamed the University Settlement, survived.
As might be expected, the Society for Ethical Culture was conspicuously on the side of virtue. It opposed municipal graft and corruption and supported good-government clubs. Adler was a member of the 1894-95 Lexow Committee and the follow-up Committee of Fifteen that exposed corruption in the New York City Police Department and its connection with prostitution. The work of these committees temporarily overthrew the Tammany Hall machine and helped pass New York’s Tenement House Law (1901). Columbia University recognized Adler’s expertise and the Ethical Culture society’s concerns by appointing him professor of social and political ethics (1902-33). The Ethical Culture movement remained small in membership, but by attracting highly motivated intellectuals, it has had an important impact on society.
See also CORRUPTION, political; HOUSING.
Further reading: Felix Adler, Creed and Deed: A Series of Discourses (1877, Reprint, NewYork: Arno Press, 1972); Benny Kraut, From Reform Judaism to Ethical Culture: The Religious Evolution of Felix Adler (Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 1979).
World History
