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.

Manuscripts and Frothingham

Welcome to Carnegie Hall! Again.

A couple of distractions (family events and a virus) pulled me off-track a little.  Once that happens, it's tough to know where to start again, simply because there are so many places that need to be "started" again.  I have work yet to do on Arthur Dobrin's publications.  But first, one of those "places" that needs attention is the collection of Carnegie Hall Lectures, which I discussed earlier this month (January 10 and January 17).  I still have some loose ends to tie up there, but I did manage to achieve the first goal for the Project:  "Document the Carnegie Addresses in the Bibliography of Ethical Culture."  All 58 addresses have now been added to the Bibliography in a new section for Manuscripts/Typescripts.  This means that I will soon be adding all those typescripts from the Algernon D. Black file (Box 9D), which I recorded last September.

One other task related to the Carnegie Lectures has also been checked off my list.  I spent some (online) time with the Felix Adler Papers that are archived in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.  Happily almost all of the lectures in the NYSEC collection can be found there.  Indeed, it seems that there may be one or more copies of most of the lectures and, perhaps, more than one version of some of them.  I'll leave it to another scholar to compare the versions and progression of thought that they might reveal, since CU is bit out of the way for me these days.  

The value of the CU archive is, for me, more than scholarly curiosity.  We have digital copies of the Carnegie Lectures, but we don't actually know where the paper copies are.  Once we find them--and I will be looking for them on my next trip to New  York--we are also likely to see that they are in very fragile condition.  It is reassuring to know that there are other copies somewhere in the world.  Since the next goals of the project may require us to look at some of those other copies, well, we can breathe again.

Such is not the case with the search for a book that I only heard about a couple of days ago:  The Radical Pulpit.  This is a collection of lectures by Octavius B. Frothingham and Felix Adler.  The bulk of the collection is Frothingham's, but it is interesting to see the senior partner give such a boost to the junior partner (so to speak) with co-authorship.  After a fair amount of time searching all the usual repositories and sellers of books, I managed to find a clear description of the book in The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout:  Volume I [The Truthseeker Library] in New Zealand.  That listing includes the following information about The Radical Pulpit:

The Radical Pulpit. Comprising discourses of advanced thought by O. B. Ffothingham (sic) and Felix Adler, two of America's clearest thinkers. By O. B. Frothingham: The New Song of Christmas, The Departed Years, Life as a Test of Creed, Apocryphal Books of the New Testament, The Sectarian Spirit, The American Gentleman, The Language of the Old Testament, The Dogma of Hell, The Value of the Higher Sentiments, The American Lady, The Consolations of Rationalism. By Felix Adler: The Ethics of the Social Question, Emancipation. Lecture at the Second Anniversary of the Society for Ethical Culture, Our Leaders, Have We Still a Religion? Conscience. Price, in cloth, $1.00

I read that as 11 lectures by Frothingham and 3 by Adler. (Punctuation matters!)  However, we will need to find a copy in order to see whether I have counted correctly.  We will also need to find a copy so that we can document the publication information.  So far I have no place and no publisher and two copyright dates.  The dates that appear in various footnotes and lists are 1878 and 1883.  In all likelihood, the dates represent two editions, but it would be helpful to see copies.  Until then, I take some pleasure in seeing the young Felix Adler, who would have been 27 in 1878, getting a leg up thanks to the older and, at the time, much more famous author and speaker (not quite elderly at 56).  Lest it seem that I am getting all sentimental about Frothingham's "kindness" to Adler, I note that, in his last publication before his death in 1822, Frothingham wrote very positively about Ethical Culture as the predicted (by Emerson) Religion of Humanity and quoted Adler extensively (without, however, naming him).

If you run across a copy of The Radical Pulpit at your local library, snap a photo of the cover page and the reverse (where all the publication info is).  Oh, and get the table of contents, too.  Please and thank you!

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.