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.