Doctor X and the Bibliography

The dustover tells the story

I'm taking a break from all the other things that are pulling at my time to "play" with the Bibliography for a while.  This sort of play is relaxing at the same time it holds my interest and provides the occasional challenge.  Right now, I am challenged to complete the inventory of NYSEC's Adler Study and decide which volumes should be added to the Bibliography.  So far I have not managed to recruit any volunteers to help with the task of converting the photos taken by Amy Schwarz and Danny Hansen (heroic volunteers themselves!) into bibliographic entries for the inventory.  So now, as a means of relaxing (really!), I'm doing it myself.

Aside from all the reasons why NYSEC (and the Ethical Culture Movement at large) might want an inventory of that collection, there are a number of other tasks to be performed, not only to protect and preserve it, but also to share it with members and interested scholars.  One task, in the not too distant future, will be to identify within the larger collection, those books which are "core."  That would include those written by Ethical Culture "thought leaders":  Society leaders, of course, but also members, writing about Ethical Culture itself and reflecting Ethical Culture in their writing (or other creations) on other topics.  This "core" will need extra protection, I believe, and will likely be moved to a new location within the Study where there will be less deterioration caused by sunlight.  I would also, of course, want to add these "core" items to the Bibliography.

One puzzle that occurs as I work my way through the full collection (I am only on the third of ten bookcases right now) is the occasional appearance of novels.   Were these of some interest for their ethical perspective?  Did a lecturer use them as a resource for a Sunday platform?  Were they written by a member of the Society?  Did they just "sneak in" to this rather special collection by accident?

I encountered the first of these novels in Bookcase A.  The title is Intern, and it was written by Dr. X, clearly a pseudonym.  A little searching on the internet provides the author's real name:  Alan E. Nourse.  Nourse, to my knowledge, is not an Ethical Culture leader.  A little more research revealed Nourse to be a science fiction writer who was also an MD, at least explaining the title.

A little more research pulls up Matthew Wisniok's Engineers for Change:  Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America due to a footnote listing Nourse and his book:  So You Want to Be an Engineer?  I had been trying to make a connection between Nourse and NYSEC (or any Ethical Culture Society), and, sure enough, NYSEC was also mentioned (sorta) in Wisniok's book.  Chapter 1, page 1:  Protesters at the 1971 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Convention in New York City gathered at Columbus Circle to protest the keynote speaker (David Packard, cf. Hewlett-Packard).  

Denied a booth inside the Convention, the dissident engineers worked to direct “ productive and creative people” to their counterconference a few blocks away at the Ethical Culture Society Hall. Those who made the trek discussed how to turn “ necrophilic” technologies into “ humane ” ones in a new organization called the Committee for Social Responsibility in Engineering (CSRE).

I can't tell you how much I hope NYSEC was a party to the development of CSRE!  

On the other hand, I'm still trying to figure out Nourse.  None of the other searches puts him in New York, so I can't make the connection that he was ever a member of NYSEC without considerably more research.  I was just about to think I'd have to read the book, when I found an image online that provided the needed enlightenment.  The dustcover tells it all:

The week-by-week diary of a young doctor during his year of hospital internship.  Frank, sometimes shocking, and completely honest, it is the first inside account of modern medical and hospital practice that has ever been . . . 

Oh!  Not actually a novel, I now consider this book a "source" for someone's lecture and will not add it to the Bibliography. 

Another novel, from Bookcase C, turns out to be "core."  Elizabeth Gertrude Stern wrote A Marriage Was Made in 1928.  A bit of searching turns up the fact that, in 1928 at least, Stern was a member of the Philadelphia Ethical Society.  That same search turned up more about her very interesting corpus of work that focused on the experience of cultural transition for immigrant families, women's roles in a time of social change, and family relationships.  I've added it to the Bibliography as a primary source.

The question of whether a source is primary or secondary is itself a troublesome one.  I added Stern's book because she was an ECS member, and I think that we must consider, in such works, whether and to what degree Ethical Culture might be an influence on the underlying philosophy which might inform or be expressed in such works.  That Stern eventually became a member of the Society of Friends, presumably leaving PES, makes that decision more complicated.  More research is needed to determine, if possible, what that decision meant to her alignment with EC and whether this or any other of her work should be included in the "core."  Interest in her presence, even if only temporarily, in the "core" might well spark more research into the history of the relationship between Ethical Culture and those who leave Judaism in America.

Some Fruits of the Ethical Education Tree

Muriel Rukeyser Quotation*

It's nice to have colleagues.  

Kirk Ruebenson contacted me several months ago to discuss the NYSEC Archives and his interest in consulting those resources.  We met, we chatted, and we shared all sorts of information about Felix Adler (and his family) as well as Ethical Culture and Kirk's particular interest--the Ethical Culture Schools.  

Because May 15 is considered "Founder's Day," the anniversary of Adler's Founding Address given in 1876, I have looking at early materials related to that occasion.  I ran across--in resources that Ruebenson had shared with me a while back--an article entitled:  “Struggle for the Soul of Felix Adler."  This led me to Jared R. Stallones, a scholar of the history of education, who wrote that article and another, "Struggle for the Soul of John Dewey:  Religion and Progressive Education.”  I read the article about Adler (thank you for sharing, Kirk) with considerable fascination, since it makes the connection between Adler's Jewish upbringing and the reflection of that upbringing and his more progressive ideas about religion as they are occur in the Temple Address ("Judaism of the Future," address to Temple Emanu-El, October 1873), a key point in Adler's pivot away from Judaism to Free Religion and, eventually, to Ethical Culture.  I hope to be able to read the article about Dewey, if I can get access to it.  In the meantime, I will add those articles and several others to the Bibliography along with Stallones' book--Conflict and Resolution:  Progressive Educators and the Question of Religion (2010)--which I have ordered.  I look forward to reading it since (a) he includes chapters on both Adler and Dewey and (b) the issue of religion in education--whether through state-supported charter schools run by religious organizations or plastering commandments all over classrooms here in Texas--is also related to the long-running discussion of the "moral instruction" of children in Ethical Culture.

In the meantime, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and ProQuest have all been helpful in tracking Stallones and, very interestingly, his citation in a dissertation by Laiti Mayk-Hai ("Towards a Poetics of I/Eye Witness:  Documentary Expression in Jewish-American Poetry of the 1930s" [Jewish Theological Seminary 2015]).  Mayk-Hai writes about the poetry of Muriel Rukeyser (among others) and links Rukeyser's writing to her years as a student in the Ethical Culture Fieldston School.  References to Adler also abound.

Ruebenson and I have shared some delightful conversations (part of the joy of collegiality) about "following rabbit trails" (part of the joy of research) as we move from one source to a reference to a whole new perspective on the issues that we are studying.  This day's work may provide yet another one of those conversations.  In the meantime, I must email him the link to Mayk-Hai's dissertation.

*Image credit:  Wikipedia contributors. “Muriel Rukeyser,” May 6, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Rukeyser#/media/File:Library_Walk_6.JPG.

International Journal of Ethics

"And miles to go before I sleep" . . . might aptly apply to the current task.  I was fortunate enough to run across an index to International Journal of Ethics for the first 24 or so volumes.  I am now working my way through the index to identify appropriate articles for inclusion in the Bibliography.  I am also fortunate that this journal is "important" enough to be digitized and available--in whole or in part--in several repositories.  The "miles to go" is the not-tedious-but-time-consuming effort to access each article, determine whether it is appropriate for the Bibliography, and then document it.  Of course, nothing is ever that simple.  It's one thing to see the Felix Adler's name (for an obvious example) shows 9 entries in the index.  It's another to determine whether the article is pertinent to Ethical Culture.  (In Adler's case, that's pretty much a no brainer.  He wrote it, so it's in.)  It's still another to determine how to include the article.  That's one point at which time can be consumed.  

In October, 1891, Adler published "The Problem of Unsectarian Instruction" (IJE, 2:1, pp. 11-19).  A couple of issues later (IJE, 2:3, pp. 374-75) there is his "Brief Rejoinder to J. Mavor (D)."  The "D" indicates that this is a discussion entry, so now I need to check J. Mavor's article to see what Adler is discussing.  As it happens, Mavor was discussing Adler's earlier article on unsectarian instruction.  Adler's rejoinder to Mavor provided the same information given by the footnote linked to the title of his original article:  

Introductory lecture of a course on Moral Instruction, given before the School of Applied Ethics, Plymouth, Mass., July 1891.  [The complete course of sixteen lectures will be published by D. Appleton & Co., New York.] 

And, sure enough, The Moral Education of Children (the complete course), was duly published as Volume 21 in Appleton's International Education Series in 1892.

The conundrum of which is primary, which secondary, and how to cite a discussion article has sent me thumbing through the Chicago Manual of Style (which is not a bad thing), but that adds to the consumption of time, because, well, I have to read some of these articles as well, don't I?

So, I've added one article by Jane Addams ("Ethical Survivals in Municipal Corruption") and will turn next to Bernard Bosanquet (British philosopher, active with the London Ethical Society).  But the time is taken with looking up biographical information, thumbing through--and pausing to read--the articles themselves, and considering the context both within and without Ethical Culture as these papers were written and sometimes delivered at various meetings.  It is rather like one of Felix Adler's favorite escapes, hiking in the Adirondack--an escape from the intense activity of life in the city, a chance to recoup a sense of peace and place, a rigorous bit of exercise that keeps one's faculties "in shape."

It will take a while to complete this "exercise."  The index for these earlier years of IJE (now published by the University of Chicago as Ethics) runs for 15 pages of abbreviated entries.  On a first pass, I have marked (on my copy) the names of authors that I recognize from previous work on the Bibliography.  Bosanquet already had one entry; ow we have the chance to learn more of his work in Ethical Culture.  Most of the names I have marked are, admittedly, past leaders of the early Societies.  After this first "pass" through the list, there will also need to be a further review of authors and topics.  Likely this will take months before I might consider that I have done all that I can, but there are two points that might bring an end to this somewhat wandering reflection on the IJE index:  (1) A structured plan to add entries to the Bibliography from this resource has now begun, and (2) after some time away from working on the Bibliography, it's good to be back, wandering through the hills and valleys of ideas and discussions, noting the milestones, looking with awe at the vistas of thought and knowledge that we can now add to our understanding of the history of Ethical Culture.

North American Review

Thomas Hunter

Because He Walked the Talk

Once in a while, I find something that intrigues me, that leads me down a new path.  Almost always I find something wonderful along that path even if the path doesn't seem to take me anywhere equally wonderful.  (Or something like that.  Metaphor is weak today.)  

So yesterday, I ran across a paper on the internet.  It was entitled "'Modernity' in Education around 1900," written by Jürgen Oelkers and sourced as "Opening lecture Conference 'Pragmatism in the Reticle of Modernization - Contexts, Concepts, Critiques' Centro Stefano Franscini Ascona, 7 September 2008." [https://www.ife.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ffffffff-bb47-55f9-0000-0000209b615d/Ascona2008english.pdf, accessed March 26, 2025].  I think I was searching for information about Standard Hall, the location at which Felix Adler delivered what is called the "Founding Address" in 1876.  Since Oelkers mentions that lecture and its location, Google gave me this new path to follow.

Oeklers' bibliography included two Adler references that I had not seen before.

Adler, F. (1880): Educational Needs. In: The North American Review Vol. 136, No. 316 (March), p. 290-295.

Adler, F. (1889): The Democratic Ideal in Education. With an Illustration from the Workingman's School and Free Kindergarten, New York. In: The Century Vol. XXXVIII, New Series Vol. XVI (May to October), p. 927-930.  

So I looked them up.  Well, I looked up the first one, which took me further down that branch of the path to The North American Review.  I have yet to backtrack and follow the other branch (The Century), but I'm sure that will also be interesting.  The NAR branch was a bit of a challenge since the serial is still published, but its earlier volumes are no longer archived by the publisher.  Fortunately, The Hathi Trust has archived several volumes of the journal.  The NAR was founded in 1815 in Boston.  Oelkers references the 136th volume and gives the date as 1880, so it took a bit of searching to find that the 136th volume was published from January to June of 1883.  As it happens, the NAR issues two volumes per year.

A bit more search showed that Adler's article was part of a set of articles on the same topic by four contributors, including:

• G. Stanley Hall (earned the first PhD in psychology in the US);
• Thomas Hunter (founder of the Female Normal and High School, now Hunter College);
• Mary Putnam Jacobi (American physician, first woman graduate of a pharmacy college in the US).

On the whole, a rather elite panel for this discussion, providing a diversity of perspectives and well-worth considering as a whole.

Happily, the scan of this journal that was taken from the Cornell University collection also includes the index.  Happy is the path that passes by an index, I always (well, sometimes) say.  In this case, the path was a very happy one.  I found reference to yet another Adler article ("A Secular View of Moral Training"), Moncure D. Conway ("Gladstone"); Edwin P. Whipple ("Carlyle and Emerson"); Frederic Henry Hedge ("Ethical Systems"); and O. B. Frothingham ("Criticisms and Christianity").  Both of the Adler articles will now go in the Bibliography as will the third once I have a chance to follow the path to The Century and confirm it.  The relevance of the other articles to the Ethical Culture "core" of the Bibliography remains a question.

These are my unanswered questions plus a couple of opinions:

• Moncure D. Conway's name comes up often because of his association with the South Place Chapel in London, which was renamed the South Place Ethical Society when Stanton Coit replaced him as "leader."  Later, Conway replaced Coit, who moved on to the London Ethical Society.  South Place was eventually renamed as Conway Hall.  Did he lead South Place as an Ethical Society when he replaced Coit?  It's possible, of course, but I think Conway is an important historical figure to whom we owe some concern for accuracy.  That would also entail more research as well.
• Edwin P. Whipple's article is not directly related to Ethical Culture except to the extent that it relates to the two named writers who influenced and/or caught the attention of Ethical Culture leaders.  M. M. Mangasarian delivered two lectures at Carnegie Hall in 1894 concerning Carlyle and then Emerson.  Other leaders talked about them as well.  While this article doesn't seem like a candidate for the Bibliography, I'd certainly keep it handy for reference if I were to write about what various lecturers in the Movement had to say about Emerson and Carlyle.
• Frederic Henry Hedge's article doesn't seem to point toward Ethical Culture either.  He was however, one of the early Transcendentalists and, although he left that Movement eventually, he remained within the circle of friendships that arose from it.  His focus on ethics, especially in a journal that published Adler, warrants some attention, at the very least.  (I may have talked myself into adding this one to the Bibliography.)
• O. B. Frothingham was Adler's mentor in the Free Religious Association.  Adler left the FRA in 1882 because it seemed unable to walk the talk, but he hosted the memorial service for Frothingham at Carnegie Hall before the New York society for Ethical Culture in 1895.  As ubiquitous as Frothingham's name is whenever the early years of Ethical Culture are discussed, I tend to think we don't know enough about the man, his work, and his influence on Felix Adler.  Yet another path to follow?  (Yes.)

So, yes, there are many more volumes of the North American Review to review.  Miles to go before I sleep?   Or maybe this is a time to call for volunteers.  As paths go, this doesn't involve a lot of walking--if anyone is interested.

Update:  I just found the published source of the Oelkers article that I found as a PDF file online.  The citation would be:

Oelkers, Jürgen.  "'Modernity' in Education around 1900," in Pragmatism and Modernity.  edited by Daniel Tröhler, Thomas Schlag, and Fritz Osterwalder.  57-79.  Leiden:  Brill, 2010.

Adding it to the Bibliography now.

The Free Church of Universal Religion

Don't bother to Google that.  The reference in the title is to the church established in Tacoma, Washington, by Alfred W. Martin.  Or rather it is the church that he led to break from the Unitarian fellowship to become a Free Church around 1894.  It doesn't seem to exist anymore, but the name is one that reflects the early interest and work of this EC Leader, pre-EC.

Martin served as an Associate Leader for the New York Society for Ethical Culture (1907-1932) and, for twenty of those years, gave Sunday evening programs on comparative religion.  A large number of his works are already listed in the Bibliography of Ethical Culture.  I recently had the opportunity to talk about his work with the Ethical Society of Austin.  Preparing for that talk led me to a memorial essay by George O'Dell, Martin's colleague at NYSEC, which was published in World Unity Magazine in 1934.  O'Dell's personal knowledge of Martin, his life, and his work helped give me a more rounded picture of a very prolific writer who doesn't seem to figure in the "folklore" of Ethical Culture.  That is to say, few of us have ever heard of him.

Whether or not that will change as a result of my research, I can't say.  However, I have had several gratifying days of searching for and documenting his work.  While the same bibliographic quandaries his work raised earlier still remain, I am pleased to be able to add more entries from The Free Church Record, the serial that Martin edited and published from 1893 to 1900.  While much of Martin's writing in that journal reflect his own "spiritual journey" on a clearly theistic path, Ethical Culture is present here and there in the volumes of the journal that I have documented so far (1896 - 1897).  Since I can't yet resolve that issue of whether to "include everything" or just focus on what he wrote while actively engaged in Ethical Culture, I am just appending his non-EC writing to the Bibliography (temporarily, of course) while I figure out the best approach.  I do think the insights offered by his earlier writings will be useful if someone decides to do a more thorough study of Martin's development than is provided by O'Dell's brief tribute.  

Advancing the Bibliography, Bit by Bit

Distractions come in all forms--home, health, work on the NYSEC archives, holidays, and on and on.  I have not been able to work as consistently on the Bibliography of Ethical Culture as I would like in the past few months.  One advantage of a quiet holiday is time for the mind to return to whatever constitutes homeostasis.  For me, that "set point" or baseline seems to involve a chance to tinker with the Bibliography.  And so I did.

This morning's tinkering was a return to Ethical Addresses.  I am trying to track down the publication history of the articles in this serial, starting with the First Series (1895).  The volume's preface indicates that all of the lectures included were "given before Ethical Societies" and one had been published in the Forum.  Only M. M. Mangasarian's address--"The Religion of Ethical Culture"--includes specifics about its history, i.e., that it was an address given to the Chicago Ethical Society, April 8, 1894.  

Recently I found a typed list of addresses delivered to the New York Society for Ethical Culture from 1893 to 1933.  The list provided dates for Felix Adler's three addresses, all three of which appear to have been presented at Carnegie Hall:

• What Do We Stand For? - October 22, 1893
• The Modern Saint - March 11, 1894
• Prayer and Worship - December 2, 1894

The first of these was acknowledged as having been published in The Forum without providing more specific information.  I managed to track it down--The Forum, Volume 16, November 1893, pp. 379-87--with the title:  "Modern Scepticism and Ethical Culture."  At the same time, I found that the version published in EA had an addendum not included in the original essay--"A Statement as to the Attitude of the Ethical Movement toward Religion"--which is attributed to the joint agreement of the Ethical Culture "lecturers" of the period.

The Ethical Society of St Louis has inventoried and had posted a large portion of its archives online, but now that material seems to be unavailable to non-members.  I did (earlier) manage to confirm the dates (years) when Walter L. Sheldon's two lectures were given to that Society:

• What Does it Mean to Be Religious, and What Is Religion? - 1894
• True Liberalism - 1894

I was unable to find further references to any of William M. Salter's lectures in this volume.  The search will continue.

Another "area" for recent work on the Bibliography has been the result of the DDOS attack on the Internet Archive in October.  All of the issues of Ethical Addresses & Ethical Record are posted there as are many other works that have been listed in the Bibliography.  In the weeks following the attack(s), none of these works were available, which substantially hampered my ability to check references and such.  One task that I had intended to carry out was to add the link to each issue of EA&ER to each article listed in the Bibliography.  I had already provided links to the volumes, but that still required users to scroll up and down between the volume link and the individual articles.  Thinking I would make things easier to use, I started adding those links.  Since it's a tedious process, I would only complete one issue in a day and move on to something more interesting.  That work came to a screeching halt with the DDOS attacks and made me very aware of the vulnerability of a sole repository.  Now that service has returned, I am continuing to add those links.  It's still just as tedious, so it will be a while before I complete the effort, but at least it's possible.

One thing that is no longer possible with the Internet Archive is the result of another sort of attack, this one entirely legal but with lasting effect.  Hatchette v. Internet Archive resulted in the removal of thousands of books that had been made available for online lending--one hour at a time--from the site.  I can no longer remotely check out a book to look at its contents and determine whether it is relevant for the Bibliography much less spend any time reading it.  This will slow some of the work down considerably, since I have limited mobility and find it difficult to park and enter the brick and mortar libraries that are within driving distance of my home.  

Going forward (while remaining in out-of-copyright territory), I have begun looking at the International Journal of Ethics, which was published by the AEU from 1890 to 1914.  The goal will be to continue searching for overlap between EA&ER and IJE as well as to identify more primary and secondary sources related to Ethical Culture.  Hathi Trust looks like it will be my source for this material.  It should keep me busy between home, health, NYSEC archives, holidays and so on and on.

Happy new year!

Hunting the Snark in the NYSEC Archives, Part I

The Birth of Carnegie Hall

I am honored to have received the 2024 Mossler Grant from the New York Society for Ethical Culture to work on a project related to a corpus of lectures to NYSEC delivered between 1893 and 1910 at Carnegie Hall.  It is called, appropriately, The Carnegie Hall Project (and abbreviated as CH in much of my notes).  I started the project when the late Lawn'ence Miller granted me access to the digital scans of some of the CH lectures and wanted to know (and find) more.  As work progresses on converting those scanned lectures into more readable--and editable--formats, I have been searching for the hard copies of those lectures as well as the others that I am hoping also exist in the archives.

I sincerely hope that I am not hunting for a snark, or worse, a boojum.  In the meantime, I've found a fair number of clues to where we should be hunting and some fascinating information about what we are looking for.  

The most concrete resource is the digital file folder of CH lectures that L (as we called him) gave me.  I have already referred to that corpus is earlier posts, so I will try not to repeat myself, but there has been some progress in at least defining the scope of the project.

• Two typewritten lists of lectures to NYSEC have been discovered in the archives and the Adler Study.  I have compared the archive "record" to the AS "ledger" for the period between 1893 (when NYSEC began meeting at CH) and 1910 (when the Meeting House was completed).  
• The "record," with corrections and additions from the "ledger," has now been entered into a spreadsheet, recording date of delivery, title, speaker, and any other information available at this time about the venue, the text, or the speaker.  There is, of course, very little additional information at the moment, but I hope that will change in the coming days as I review other online sources.
• There were seventeen seasons of lectures given at Carnegie Hall.  All of the seasons began around the third Sunday in October (except the 1894-95 season, which began on the first Sunday of November).  Most of the seasons ended around the second Sunday in May with an anniversary address, almost always given by Felix Adler.
• The number of addresses given during a season ranged from 28 to 31, with most having 30 addresses.  Occasionally a late steamer or illness would cause a change in plans for addresses, and a substitution would be listed, but one or two lectures may have been cancelled--or records lost.  The total number of addresses appears to be either 505 or 507.  Until further records--or the lectures themselves--are recovered, the actual total is inexact.
• Adler himself delivered about 60 percent of the lectures (296).  A significant portion of the remainder were given by other leaders of the Movement, including John Lovejoy Elliott (33), Alfred W. Martin (21), Stanton Coit (17), William M. Salter (8), Walter L. Sheldon (10), David S. Muzzey (4), M. M. Mangasarian (30), Leslie Willis Sprague (16), Percival Chubb (9)--and Anna Garlin Spencer (9).  (These numbers do not reflect 5 meetings with untitled presentations from one or more of these leaders speaking with a group of presenters.)
• About 10 percent of the addresses at CH were delivered by guest speakers, including several notables (e.g., Gifford Pinchot) and academics (Nathaniel Schmidt, Edward Howard Griggs, and Charles Zueblin).  Only four women took the platform alone:  Enid Stacy Widdrington, Ethel M. Arnold, Caroline Bartlett-Crane, and Anna Garlin Spencer.  Several platforms were devoted to race-related issues.  Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois spoke as individual lecturers, but there were more than one panel of presenters on this recurring topic.
• As for topics, the CH lectures ran the gamut from Ethics to politics and elections (and the ethics thereof), from contemporary literature to the sacred texts of ancient days, from the travails of poverty to the discomfort of the wealthy.  Given the times, race relations, women's issues, and labor reforms were frequent topics.  

Now that we know more about the corpus of this "collection," we have to find the collection.  There are some hints.  In the process of tracking down those hints, I am also finding out more about Carnegie Hall, cf. the video link above.