Ethical Books and Pamphlets

John Mitchell, President of UMWA, with "Breaker Boys"

Working with the Fifteenth Series of Ethical Addresses and Ethical Record had it challenges, one of which was to check the lists of Ethical books and pamphlets listed for sale on the covers of each monthly number.  I was looking to see which addresses already published in EA&ER were then also printed as pamphlets and sold "at the library table" for, literally, nickels and dimes.  This provided a "quality check" in two ways:

1. Any address listed as a pamphlet that did not appear in EA&ER might be something that I missed when documenting the series that I have looked at so far;
2. After doublechecking for that error, I can feel fairly certain that we are looking at pamphlets that were important for some reason--so it would be good to find and document them.

A case in point are four addresses by Felix Adler:

• "The Ethics of the Political Situation";
• "The Ethics of the Labor Struggle";
• "Evils Disclosed by the Coal Strike";
• "The Sabbath and the World's Fair."

All four of these seem to be related to current events, whether local, national, or international initially unclear.  

The coal strike seems to refer to the Pennsylvania coal strike in 1902.  The John Mitchell Papers, archived on microfilm at Cornell, show the second and third pamphlets preserved on Reel 54 (Items 1 and 2).  The guide to that reel indicates that both were also published in The Ethical Record, which had not at that time been merged with Ethical Addresses.  While we have located a complete set of the latter, the former has been a little more elusive.  There is also documentation of the second pamphlet, via Horace Friess, in Esther Lifschitz' Senior History thesis at Columbia (2010).  

With a little more searching, another citation about the coal strike appeared.  It is from the Theodore Roosevelt Papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Collection (Evils disclosed by the coal strike. Theodore Roosevelt Papers. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o39591.)  Fortunately there's also the whole address, originally given on October 19, 1902, and published in The Ethical Record as a "Lecture Supplement."  The scan is dark, the interface is fiddly, but the address is both readable and accessible.

The fourth pamphlet is identified as a platform delivered on January 29, 1893, and is preserved in Box 19 of "Felix Adler papers, 1830-1933" archived at Columbia University.  The only other reference I've found to it is in a list of publications (perhaps the same list that I am using) copied into Stanton Coit's history of Ethical Culture in England.

The first pamphlet--"The Ethics of the Political Situation"--was the last I searched for, assuming it to be too vaguely titled to be findable.  Of course, it turned out to be easier to find than the others.  (Thanks, Google Books!)  It's also turning out to be an interesting read, referring to the 1884 election contest between Grover Cleveland and James G. Blaine (without naming either candidate).  That contest was full of ethical, moral, and legal breaches (and accusations of such breaches) and certainly worthy of an address on the ethics of the "situation" by Adler.  I found it interesting that the date of the address--October 19, 1884--was the 100th anniversary of the day of thanksgiving declared when the War of Independence was finally over.  Adler's words ring true today as he (and our nation's founders) called us to maintain high regard for the national honor and to raise our young with those "fundamental virtues whereon the true welfare of peoples and governments depends."  Adler, by the way, advocated for "none of the above" candidates, because of character.  Both candidates, he argued, failed to live up to the standards demanded by our national honor, so he advised his listeners:

At such a time, then, as this, I believe it right that we should look about among the candidates; and, if we find any one whose character is strong and whose record is stainless, that we should cast our votes for him, no matter on what party platform he may stand. For, in this contest, party platforms are not at issue, and character is all in all . 

Happily, none of these four pamphlets were "missed addresses" in my earlier documentation of our Ethical literature, but looking for more information to document them has certainly been worth the effort.  That they were important enough to warrant separate publication is revealed as we discover them in archives related to the political actors of the period.  Hopefully we can find better ways to incorporate them into our own understanding of the role that Adler and others played in our nation's history.