They Builded Better

Felix Adler

I'm still trying to find my rhythm after my trip to New York.  I'm not sure I'm there, but I am at least back in the mode to share the joys of old books and bibliographic work.  

One of the rewards of that trip to New York is that I now have folks who have joined me in the work.  Dan Hanson and Amy Schwarz, both members of the New York Society for Ethical Culture and both retired librarians, have begun the arduous task of developing an inventory of the Adler Study.  Dan is photographing the title pages (and reverse) of all the books in that collection.  Amy is straightening, organizing, and checking for Ethical Culture content.  The plan is to upload the photos to an online workspace so that I can convert the information to bibliographic entries.  

The value of this work is that it will help us identify publications that should be included in the Bibliography of Ethical Culture at the same time it can be used to create an inventory of the collection.  

This is a massive task.  There are 10 largish bookcases in the Adler Study with 6 shelves each.  On the first day of work, Dan photographed the contents of 5 shelves in the first case.  (The sixth has books that are fragile and need special care.)  That was 235 pictures (we don't have a count of the books yet).  So far I have created 23 entries for the inventory, cross-checking every title with online repositories to see what has already been digitized.  That takes time, because, remember, I'm having fun.  The top shelf on that first case has Carl Sandburg's multi-volume life of Lincoln.  I had to look at it and see what was there (a chapter on Lincoln's humor and his religion--I'll read that when I get a chance).  Ida Tarbell also made the shelf with her Lincoln biography.  Why so much about Lincoln, you ask?  One answer might be found in the Bibliography with the two platforms given by Algernon D. Black on Lincoln.  As we dig further into the archives at NYSEC, we may find more.  Then it will be interesting to see what our Ethical Culture leaders made of Lincoln and how they used his life to discuss ethics.  

In the meantime, one other find on (or around) this first shelf, Julius Henry Cohen's book, They Builded Better Than They Knew caught my attention with its archaic past tense.  Cohen's rather chatty book focuses on people and groups that he admired.  The chapter on Felix Adler was an entertaining look at Adler's sense of humor and praise of his contributions to legal ethics and labor relations.  The book was published in 1946, 13 years after Adler's death.  It is a valuable reminder at 90 or so years after Adler's death that he was human, not the cardboard figure that he might sometimes become in our thinking.  Cohen's small chapter helps to give us a more three-dimensional view of the founder of Ethical Culture.  There is also the reminder that Adler did not live a cloistered life of study and contemplation but rather involved himself rather deeply--and to good effect--in matters of the day.

Science for Democracy

Hiroshima Peace Memorial

Home again after almost three weeks at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, a time filled with many meetings and discussions of the archives of the Ethical Culture Movement, I am now trying to sort through my notes and papers to assess what was accomplished for the expansion of the Bibliography.  At the moment I am finding notes on Jerome Nathanson, NYSEC leader, mid-twentieth century.  One book that has caught my attention is Science for Democracy.  First published in 1946, the Internet Archive has a digitized copy of the 1970 reprint by Books for Libraries Press.  

Nathanson edited the volume and wrote a preface in which he argues that it is the role of scientists to insist on freedom of inquiry in a democratic nation.  It is the role of those who are not scientists to break any habits of complacency and educate themselves about the importance of science and free inquiry to a democratic nation so that they can support such inquiry for the sake of the nation.  

The chapters of the book are the results of several papers and two symposia that were presented as part of the Third Conference on Scientific Spirit and Democratic Faith, held at NYSEC, May 1945, and chaired by Nathanson.  He points out that the conference was held "weeks before a section of the earth was atomized, and before even those who knew were at liberty to say that such a thing as the atom bomb was in the immediate offing" (viii).  The questions/topics posed for the symposia were:

• Does private industry threaten freedom of scientific research?
• The role of science in the determination of democratic policy.

The sections on the symposia seem to be taken from transcripts, giving a strong sense of the give and take of the discussions among a diverse group of academic, industry, government, and religious speakers.  Eighty years on--just after a difficult period of shutdown in the midst of a global pandemic during which science was disvalued/disregarded by government as well as citizens--these discussions still seem relevant.  

Horace James Bridges, Firebreather

Horace James Bridges (1880 -1955), leader of the Chicago Ethical Society, "discovered" by Stanton Coit in England and sent to the US to apprentice with Felix Adler, is a delight to read--and to read about.  He rivals Arthur Dobrin in his output, of which I have documented in the Bibliography as much as I could manage, but Bridges is widely cited--into the current century--so tracking down secondary sources will take time and effort.  

I've known for some time that there was once a leader named Bridges, but I didn't actively seek out his works until several recent nudges made me actively wonder about who, exactly, this fellow was.  Long story short, I saw a copy of his book--On Becoming an American--in a photo of a shelf in the Adler Study and decided to search for it.  I ended up skimming the preface (and wrote about it here) and was hooked.  The man has a British sense of humor so dry it crackles off of the page.  I can't speak to the entire body of his work, but what I have seen suggests passionately held points of view that invoke the dragon as much as St. George.

There is an inkling of this in Our Fellow Shakespeare, when he talks about Shylock in humane terms and credits the Bard with similar sensitivity.  The more common attitudes of the period seem covered by the steady drip of acid.  That acid becomes even more evident when Bridges takes on the issue in more direct terms with Jew-Baiting, an Old Evil Newly Camouflaged.  

Less sympathetic to our hearts these days would be his take on conscientious objectors.  They get passing notice in the nonetheless fiery "The Duty of Hatred," published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1918.  It took a bit of searching, but I did finally see a copy of As I Was Saying: A Sheaf of Essays and Discourses at Hathi Trust wherein I could read Bridges' 1917 speech on ""Military Duty and the Conscientious Objector" (pp. 159 - 184).  And I wept to read it.  To accept his logic--which is as lovely as it is painful--is to accept that I, a bystander in the conflict between Israel and Gaza, am as culpable for the crimes of that war as is my government, given that I have done little to oppose--or stop--my government's actions in the Middle East.  Being only one individual among millions, I am nonetheless given no place to hide by Bridges' logic.  It is all the more impetus to work for peace--and shame on me if I have done nothing about it today.

Pivoting (less suddenly than it may seem) to matters of bibliographic interest, I have mentioned the work yet to be done in the search for articles and news reports.  There are also reviews and continued references to his work in journals and ephemera.  A good deal of his work before 1923--and a little afterwards--is available online in various repositories.  I created a section of the Bibliography to list some of those repositories a few weeks ago.  With Bridges' entries I am now making the effort to add notations of copies of his works in those repositories.  As I Was Saying, for example, is listed in Google Books, but that site does not link to a digitized copy of the work online.  Hathi Trust links to a copy available from the "University of California."  That link is now in the Bibliography following the entry for As I Was Saying with the symbol [HT].  I regret to say that it will take some practice to make this action a habit, so there is now some inconsistency.  Practice makes perfect, they say.  Let's hope so.

A little break now.

There may be intermittent or no posts for the next couple of weeks while I am in New York, working in the Archives.  I'm sure there will be much to report when I return mid-March.

A Bibliographic Puzzle: Goulding, Golding, or Bridges?

 

Henry J. Golding

Sometimes I find puzzling items that take a bit of searching to figure out.  One such item is an entry in the James F. Hornback's dissertation bibliography.  

GOULDING, HENRY J., ed., The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Ethical Movement. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1926.

Rather often, when I find a bibliographic entry in someone else's work, I try to track it down.  Sometimes a bibliographic entry doesn't include everything that the Chicago Manual of Style and I would like to see as part of the record, so I try find the missing piece.  Or I want to see whether the source is a primary source for Ethical Culture, a secondary source, or even has any relevance at all to this Bibliography.  Sometimes, I want to see if the source is available in a format that will be accessible to those who use the Bibliography.  The latter was the purpose of my attempt to track down this citation.  All the information is there in Hornback.  The title indicates its relevance.  I just needed to see if there might be an ebook out there for us all to look at.

No such luck.  I checked Google Books, Hathi Trust, Internet Library, and so on down the line.  I couldn't find much of anything by Henry J. Goulding.  Except, when I entered his name and the title exactly as Hornback had provided them, the search engine returned a single entry:  Hornback's dissertation.  I think we've been here before.  I think this is a typo.  

Horace J. Bridges (more on him soon) actually edited the Fiftieth Anniversary tribute to Felix Adler.  Henry J. Golding contributed an essay:  "The Spiritual Outlook on Life" (pp. 227-244).  I'm still looking for Henry J. Goulding.

On the other hand, serendipity occurred yet again when I went searching for Henry J. Golding.  Here's what Ladywell Live has to say about Golding:

Henry J. Golding (d.1931), writer and philosopher – Henry was a man of wide erudition who relinquished a successful business career in London to become an officer and lecturer of the English Ethical Society, before moving to the US to devote himself to the work of the Ethical Movement in America. Many of his articles appeared in the New York Times and he remained a popular speaker and lecturer, one observer generously noting in his delivery his ‘deep voice and virile figure’. Many of his moral insights often appear in more modern thought for the day aphorisms including Forbes Book of Quotations!  Often cited as H.J. Golding, he died in New York in 1931. Before departing for the US he lived at 16, Algiers road, Ladywell.

I expect there will more to learn about Golding, if not Goulding. 

Reminiscences of Algernon David Black

More serendipity.  This time someone asked me about Algernon D. Black.  I shared what I had (not a whole lot outside of the Bibliography), but I got curious and went looking for more.  Black was an alumnus of Harvard, which now houses many of his papers from 1932 - 1981.  Given his active public life, there are a number of records to be found in other places.  Interestingly, there is no Wikipedia page for Black (or most other Ethical Culture Leaders), but there is a page on KeyWiki:

a bipartisan knowledge base focusing primarily on corruption and the covert side of politics in the United States and globally. While particular interest is taken in the left, KeyWiki serves to expose covert politics on both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

Along the rabbit trail to find out more about Black, I also found ArchiveGrid, which lists archives of primary resources "held in archives, libraries, museums and historical societies."  One happy find was an item held by Columbia University.  It was a happy find because the material was actually digitized and available for online reading.  The ArchiveGrid entry linked to the page on Columbia Library's website about "Reminiscences of Algernon David Black, 1978."

Merritt Russell interviewed Black over several weeks about his life, including:

Immigrant background, Ethical Culture School, Harvard; early interest in civil liberties; Roger N. Baldwin; settlement house work, 1926-1933; work with West Virginia mining families, 1933; teacher and leader at Ethical Culture from 1933; co-chairman, city-wide Committee on Harlem, 1941-1947; job opportunities for blacks; state committee on fair housing, 1949; chairman of board of National Committee on Discrimination in Housing, 1950-1967; black militancy in late 1960s; chairman of Civilian Complaint Review Board of Police Department, New York City, 1966; encampments for citizenship from 1939; writing and broadcasting on ethical issues; internal security investigations[.]

These interviews were tape recorded and then transcribed.  Black read the transcripts, made corrections and additions, and, given some of the controversies that he discussed, provided additional interviews to expand on those subjects.  These interviews were part of a larger oral history project at Columbia University. 

I couldn't stop myself from taking a peek at the transcript.  Then I couldn't stop myself from reading the whole transcript, all 251 pages of it.  It was fascinating.  From his earliest childhood memories to his work for human rights; from his early school experiences to his admission to the Ethical Culture School and what that meant for his life and understanding of human relations; from his civic roles to his handling of civil rights.  And more.  

Having done so, I was more disheartened than shocked when I ran across KeyWiki and its "guilt by association" post on Algernon D. Black.  How fortunate to have his own testimony to his work and his intentions and his ethics to throw some light on the matter.  How sad to see that the McCarthy Era hasn't ended and that good people--and the memory of good people--can still be subjected to such tactics.

Well, the interview is in the Bibliography now.  You should read it.

Wayback at the AEU

 

AEU Library - On the Wayback Machine

I can't believe that I just found a Library of Ethical Culture.  It's the American Ethical Union Library.  It exists on the Wayback Machine in the Internet Library (archive.org).  The Wayback Machine shows that its last crawl of this site was November 30, 2013.  After that, pffft!  

I don't see the Library on any AEU web space that I have access to.  We can be grateful to the Wayback Machine (and now the Internet Library) for recovering this lost resource.

As a resource, the Library is rather clunky to use.  It takes noticeable seconds to pull up any page that you want to look at.  Some pages indicate that there is more to see, but the Wayback machine seems only to have captured what is on screen and not whatever would have been found by scrolling down the page.  

Nonetheless we will also "capture" what we can and continue looking for the original files.  If they haven't been deleted.

And that, friends, is another reason to do this work.  Sometimes we seem to lack continuity as well as connection to our past--even a past as recent as 2013.  Institutional memory is actually a good thing.

Happy President's Day!

What to Do with the Adler Study

 

The Adler Study at NYSEC

Ever since my trip to New York last fall and the overwhelming discoveries in the areas where the archives are kept in the NYSEC building near Central Park, I have been thinking of how we can manage to preserve, document, and increase access to as many of those discoveries as possible.  Someone recently asked me if I knew whether a particular book was in the Adler Study.  😶  That's when I realized that I had not been including this seriously important repository of history and knowledge in my plans and strategies.  

The Adler Study is a historical space within the NYSEC building, which itself is a historical space for New York City and the nation.  It was Felix Adler's study--office--conference room--center of action--from its construction in 1910 until his death in 1933.  It houses books that he wrote, that he consulted for reference, that he read for study and further cultivation of his--and his followers'--Ethical being.

When I visited Room 514 last September, I could hear the pride--and a degree of reverence--in my guide's voice.  I recognized that I had entered a space where great thoughts and deeds had occurred.  But I also saw that this was a working space for the New York Society.  A place for meetings.  A place for gathering.  But not necessarily a place for study.  With all four walls filled with tall bookcases, the wealth of information and inspiration to be found there was behind locked glass doors.

I have no desire to see those doors thrown open for the everyday use of the resources there.  Much of what is there--as far as I have seen--is unique or in fragile condition or of historical value beyond measure.  I do, however, want to know what is behind those glass doors.  I also want to read and study what is behind those glass doors.  And I want to share it with others in some way that does not damage the physical condition of the contents.

I was privileged to examine the contents of just one of those cabinets.

Cabinet A, Adler Study, 2023

Among the treasures there were bound copies of Ethical Addresses and Ethical Record as well as its successor, The Standard.  There were books that Adler might have consulted in preparing for a lecture about Lincoln, and there were books published long after his death.  The Adler Study served other Leaders in the ensuing years.  

Well, this room and its contents have to be considered as part of the NYSEC Ethical Culture Archives (I just made up that name), and I have a few thoughts about what to do next.  While I am drafting a more detailed proposal reflecting those thoughts, here's a list for starters:

• Locate or create a Statement of Purpose for the Adler Study which serves to guide policy for its preservation and use.
• Photograph the entire Study, with detailed photo-documentation of the cases and each shelf.
• Locate any past inventories of the contents of the bookcases.
• Label the bookcases and shelves for location references.
• Develop a detailed inventory/bibliography of the contents of the Study, using photo-documentation to convey records to remote analysts/compilers (guess who? 🤠).
• Identify which items in the Study have already been digitized, and determine which, of the remainder, should be digitized.
• Develop an online repository for Ethical Culture's history of thought, including at least the inventory of this collection.  Add more items as allowed by US copyright laws.
• Develop policies related to use, retention, and dissemination of the contents of the Study.
• Write a history of the space prior to its current use as both archive and meeting space.

And, apparently, the list could go on.  Now that I think about it, the same list should apply to the room across the hall from 514:  The Elliott Library.  Work to be done.  More hands needed.  Just saying.