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.

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.

Carnegie Lectures and Ethical Addresses

Octavius Frothingham, NYSEC Member

One step in determining whether and what to publish from the body of lectures presented at Carnegie Hall (1894 -1896) is checking whether an individual address has already been published elsewhere.  Using keywords to search between the list of Carnegie Lectures and a summary of the Contents of Ethical Record and Ethical Addresses, I have identified 9 Carnegie lectures that may have been published in EA&ER.  

1.    December 2, 1894, Felix Adler delivered the address "Prayer and Worship" at Carnegie Hall.  The same address was published in Ethical Addresses in 1895, First Series, pp. 159-176.

2.    February 17, 1895, William M. Salter delivered the address "The Ethics of Agnosticism" at Carnegie Hall.  The same address was published in Ethical Addresses, Second Series (1896), as "Ethical Agnosticism" (pp. 49-64).  

3.     April 14, 1895, Felix Adler delivered the address "The Teachings of Jesus" at Carnegie Hall.  An address with a similar title was published in Ethical Addresses, Sixth Series (1900), i.e., "The Teachings of Jesus in the Modern World," pp. 105-120.  The latter, however, carried the footnote that its text is from "An Easter discourse before the Society for Ethical Culture of New York, April 2nd, 1899."  A comparison of these texts might prove interesting.  Indeed, given the number of addresses that focus on the life, teaching, or ethics of Jesus given by various speakers and published over the years in various publications associated with the Movement, I daresay an article on "Four (or More) Ethical Views of Jesus" would be just as interesting as an indication of how thought has evolved--or not--regarding Jesus.

4.    November 24, 1895, Felix Adler delivered the address "The Attitude of the Modern Mind Toward the Belief in God" at Carnegie Hall.  An address (actually a compilation of three addresses) was published in Ethical Addresses, Tenth Series (1903) with the title "Changes in the Conception of God" (pp. 47-90).  A closer examination will be needed to determine whether the earlier address in incorporated into the later article or, indeed, whether and/or how Adler's thinking may have evolved over the years between these addresses.

5.    December 8, 1895, Edmund C. Stedman, George Haven Putnam, George C. Barrett, and Felix Adler provided addresses in honor of Octavius Brooks Frothingham at Carnegie Hall. The same addresses were published as "Octavius Brooks Frothingham Memorial Exercises" in Ethical Addresses, Second Series (1896), pp. 169 - 194. Reported in the New York Times on December 9, 1895, p. 6.

6.  January 5, 1896, Felix Adler delivered the address "The Monroe Doctrine and the War Spirit in the United States" at Carnegie Hall.  The same address was published in Ethical Addresses, Third Series (1897) pp. 1-20.  Reported in the New York Times (December 3, 1896), p. 3.

7.    May 10, 1896, Felix Adler, along with Camille Solomons and John Lovejoy Elliott, delivered the "Anniversary Exercises" at Carnegie Hall.  This address was followed by additional "exercises," also at Carnegie Hall on Friday, May 15.  The evening ceremony featured addresses by Alfred R. Wolff, William M. Salter, and M. M. Mangasarian as well as Adler.  The May 15 addresses were published in Ethical Addresses, Third Series (1897), pp. 99-116.  However, no typescript for these addresses seems to be included in the collection for Carnegie Hall.  Reported in the New York Times on May 16, 1896, p. 5.

8.    December 26, 1896, Felix Adler delivered the address "The Spiritual Meaning of Marriage" at Carnegie Hall.  A revised version of this address is published in Ethical Addresses, Sixth Series (1900), pp. 17-36.  Again, a textual comparison might prove interesting.

Since Ethical Addresses was being published at the same time as the Ethical Record before being merged into a single serial, both were succeeded by The Standard, and various books and collections of addresses were also being published around this period, more research is yet needed to confirm the publication history of these addresses.  At this point, my focus is on pushing forward with the Bibliography and entering the Carnegie Lectures.  More volunteers to assist in the publication research would be quite welcome!

Ethical Addresses, Series Two (1896) Part 2

The overall content of Series Two of Ethical Addresses is moving in the direction of more specific ethical issues and more precise framing of Ethical Culture rather than the broader philosophical interest of the First Series.  One essay that caught my eye was, again, from M. M. Mangasarian:  "Our Besetting Sins."  I wrote about this platform elsewhere, so I won't extend the discussion here except to point out that statements of that period continue to have relevance in the present even if only to provide a new perspective for our current thinking.  

Adler's platform, "Consolations," can also be found in this volume.  His description of the usual consolations offered in the face of death--universality of death, sympathy for loss, time's healing hand--woke within me the recollection of those consolations in facing the loss of my late husband.  Adler's clear and objective rejection of those consolations as having any real healing power made me weep.  He continued, however, to speak of compassion for and duty toward others and the functional utility of action as a source of healing (and consolation).  The thoughts that our lost loved ones live on within us brings a feeling of awe and, yes, some healing as well.  Adler ends this platform, apparently the end of a year-long series of platforms, thusly:

           The great mistake we make is that we do not look
upon our friends in the right way while they are still
alive and present with us. We cannot think of them
rightly when they are gone, if we do not think of them
rightly while they are still living. Often we regard them
as if they were our property. We believe that they exist
for the sake of our happiness, though we admit that we
also exist for the sake of theirs. But happiness is an
ambiguous term which easily becomes misleading. We
should look upon our beloved with more of awe. Their
true ministry is to be for us Revealers of the Divine, to
teach us to estimate rightly the things that are worth
trying for and the things that are not, to help us to become
equal to the standard of our best performance, and
to grow into our own true selves. And the world is not
dark when they have departed, because what they have
revealed remains. Their influence remains. The light
of their countenance still shines upon us. And to walk
always in that light, to live in the spirit of the holy dead
—worthy of them—is the supreme consolation.  [Emphasis added.]

As is often the case with Adler, it's difficult to excerpt the core idea without bringing along a fair amount of rhetorical flourish.  I'm not so sure about "Revealers of the Divine" or "holy dead," but Adler seems to have gotten well within range of something that qualifies as a consolation for such loss.  And, of course, I wept. (What?  Tears can heal, too.)

The Bibliography for Ethical Culture is now online!  I have placed it in my own Google Drive for the time being.  I continue to seek partners in this work.  In the meantime, I gratefully acknowledge the encouragement and advice given by Louise Jett (St. Louis Society for Ethical Culture) as I have taken some of the initial steps in this project.

Ethical Addresses - First Series - 1895

 

Ethical Addresses was a serial publication presented by the American Ethical Union.  The AEU was formed in 1889, 13 years after Felix Adler's Founding Address, which established the New York Society for Ethical Culture.  In those intervening years, three additional Societies were founded in Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago.  The Leaders for each of these three newer Societies apprenticed under the supervision of Adler in New York and then set out to found their own Societies in those cities.  In 1889, they formed the Union, and in 1895 they began assembling an annual series of volumes which collected selected platforms (speeches) given by the Leaders.  

The First Series, published in 1895, included three essays each by Felix Adler (New York) and William M. Salter (Philadelphia) and two essays each by Walter L Sheldon (St. Louis) and M. M. Mangasarian (Chicago).  The topics tend to cluster around general questions of religion and philosophy and where Ethical Culture fits in.  I have yet to read all of these essays, but I expect there will be some interesting variations among the different Leaders' viewpoints and our thinking in the present day.  I personally find it interesting to consider where we began, with the emphasis on idealism, and how we've changed, with more emphasis on pragmatism.  Naturalism in one form or another does seem to have endured.  

Two essays struck me as different from the others, so I've read them first.  One, by Adler, was "Prayer and Worship."  I rather expected that Adler would have condemned both prayer and worship as futile, there being no evidence of a deity and Adler himself urging us to put creed aside for the sake of common action.  His Founding Address, moreover, had emphasized that our Ethical Culture meetings would be "simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism."  In the same address, he added:

We propose to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. Thus shall we avoid even the appearance of interfering with those to whom prayer and ritual, as a mode of expressing religious sentiment, are dear. [Emphasis added.]

I have seen nothing in any Ethical Culture Society meeting that I have attended (so far) that sounds like prayer or smacks of worship.  Adler surprised me in this platform.  He did find some space for both prayer and worship--as functions--within Ethical Culture, and what he came up with might even have qualified as religious experience to John Dewey.  In any case, I found it a lovely way to accept those concepts into Ethical Culture.

The second essay, by Mangasarian, is an interesting and sometimes practical discussion of "Teaching and Teachers."  Coming from a family of teachers and having some experience in the area myself, I was curious to see what Magasarian had to say.  As expected, there were some attitudes that fit in well with the period, including comments about women teachers and their need to be, well, more ladylike.  He did, however, make some very astute comments about both the value of education and the degree to which informal behaviors become lasting influences.  I'll probably read it again for the sake of its relevance to current discussions about education, the role of parents, and the influence of religion and politics on a, presumably, areligious and apolitical institution.

With this First Series came an immediate set of questions related to bibliographic style and the logistics of the project.

• Ethical Addresses is a serial.  It is an annual collection of speeches by different authors.  There is no named editor.  I am using the Chicago style for bibliographic entries, citing both the individual volumes of the series and each essay title as separate entries. 

         Author Last Name, First M. "Chapter or Essay Title." In Book Title, edited by First M. Last Name, page range.     Place of Publication: Publisher, date.

• Ethical Addresses is long out of copyright.  The entire series has been "digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation."  All of the volumes are available in the Internet Archive (archive.org), some from multiple scan sources.  The First Series can be seen here.  The entire volume can be downloaded in PDF and other formats to read offline.
• It is possible with current technology to extract individual articles from the original volume.  I have, for my personal use, extracted both the Adler and Mangasarian articles discussed above so that I can look at them more closely to refer to them in my writing.  I would be interested to discuss the ethics of reposting those or other articles on a different website might be.  
• The First Series (and others in the series) has been reprinted from the Internet Archive scans by Leopold Classic Library and can be ordered on Amazon and other sources.

Next week I hope to have found a home for the bibliography so that others can use it as a resource.  Each iteration will be dated to reflect its current status (later dates will reflect more entries having been added).  I have begun adding the entries for Series Two; One and Three are completed; the background research on authors and subjects may take a bit more time to complete.