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.

Converting PDFs to Editable Text

 Or something like that.  We have about 58 (could be 57) PDF files of addresses given at Carnegie Hall in the 19th and 20th NYSEC seasons.   I have long wanted to convert them to something more readable and/or editable.  As the texts currently exist, they appear to be carbon copies of typed scripts.  The paper is yellowed with age, but it also seems to be a thin onion skin.  The carbon paper had, no doubt, been used several times already, hence the slightly blurred type.  The scans sometimes showed folded pages--obscuring text--and frequently were tilted to some greater or lesser degree from the horizontal.  To be honest--if also a tad biased--it's just not comfortable to read these texts.

I tried to convert the PDFs to Word files, so that they might be a bit more readable.  This was the result:

Not only was this even worse for reading, it was not going to be usable if we wanted to consider print publication.  

So I tried another method to create readable text:  Dictation.  Reading aloud to MS Word, I applied clear diction to spoken punctuation and formatting instructions and managed to read an entire address into Word.  This was much better.  It took awhile to figure out the command "lingo" (Word wants to hear "new line" rather than "paragraph").  The process was somewhat tiring.  Some measure of proofreading and reformatting would still be needed, but the outcome was readable.

Then my grandson asked "Why don't you just retype it?"  So I tried that, too.  Although I'm not a trained typist, I have gained some speed over the years, and I managed to retype about 4 pages in an hour. Retyping was, in my mind, the easier and more productive (less tiring) way to get a readable text (more attractive to the contemporary reader).  Even more important, retyping into a word processing program such as Word allows for easier copyediting and reformatting for print and online publication.

With that bit of "research," the project had to sit on the back burner while other projects took priority.  Eventually I was asked to talk about some of one of those projects for a Sunday gathering of the Ethical Society of Austin.  I presented:  "The Big Dig:  Delving into the History of Thought in Ethical Culture." Some of my talk was about online repositories of digital books and journals, but most of it was about the Bibliography of Ethical Culture.  I tossed out tidbits of (to me) fascinating information that I had been discovering as I worked on the Bibliography, and I took every opportunity to highlight points at which many hands could make the work light.  The good news?  Three new partners in the work!

For now the exciting news is that one of those partners, an excellent typist, will help pull the Carnegie Hall Project off of the back burner and get to work on giving us some new typescripts to work with.  Stay tuned.

Finding Matthew Ies Spetter

 

Matthew Ies Spetter

A few weeks ago, while visiting the New York Society for Ethical Culture (NYSEC), I had an opportunity to work with an archive box that I had previously "rescued" from the basement.  The basement area in which archives are stored is due for renovation, and there are ongoing discussions about where and how to store the archived materials now located there.  While "rescue" is too strong a term for my action, I did take the opportunity that presented itself to me to carry the box from the basement to the new "office" for the Archives Team in Room 406B at NYSEC for further study.  

What prompted this rather audacious act was the label on the box:  "Matthew Ies Spetter, Platforms 1970-1978."  I recognized the name and wanted to know more about this man who fought in the Dutch Resistance during World War II, survived Auschwitz, and became an Ethical Culture Leader when he immigrated to the US.  Who wouldn't?

The box contained 83 mimeographed platforms presented at the Riverdale-Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture (RYSEC).  The platforms were published by RYSEC for distribution to subscribers in a serial called simply The Platform.   (There were also 5 or 6 typescripts of speeches given elsewhere or drafts of the later platforms in the box.)  One of the basic tasks in working with the archives is to document what we have.  I have done just that, and all of the platforms in that box that were published in The Platform are now listed in the Bibliography of Ethical Culture.  The same list plus the typescripts has been prepared for inclusion in the archive box as an inventory of its contents.  Since Spetter served as leader for RYSEC, there are likely to be many more platforms to be documented, but, first, we'll have to find them.

Fortunately, there are also a number of platforms given by Spetter at NYSEC.  When he retired from RYSEC, Spetter became a part-time leader at NYSEC.  Many of these were published in The Ethical Platform, NYSEC's in-house serial.  More about those in another post.

Now we come to another basic task for this work:  digitization.  Digitization--or scanning--is a much more time-consuming aspect of the work, but it is needful since so much of the past work of leaders and thinkers in the Movement is out of print or unpublished or no longer being sold.  By digitizing these works, we can store them in offsite (or in the cloud) locations, which protects against the loss of items for which there are only one or a few copies.  

One further benefit of digitization is the possibility of making the work accessible to a wider audience.  Right now, unless RYSEC has the means to have a reading or lending library, these particular platforms cannot be seen by the general membership.  Once they are digitized, they can be stored on a website or drive that is accessible to members.  

There are a lot of steps yet to complete before that can happen, but the process has begun.  We have requested permission from RYSEC to post these platforms online once we have scanned them.  We still have to do the scanning, set up the online storage repository, and develop policies for access, but we have a tentative target of May 15, 2025, to have something ready for member, if not public, access.  May 15, 2025, will mark the beginning of the 150th year since the Ethical Culture Movement was founded.  We will have a lot of reading to catch up on before the 150th anniversary rolls around!

On the Dating of Adler's Platforms

I've just made a personal "joke," reminding myself of an incredibly minor article that I once published entitled "On the Dating of Utendi wa Ayubu."  The joke is as minor as the article, so I will leave it with the wry smirk that issues do seem to repeat themselves.  Today's repetition has to do with dating, as in "when was that publicly presented?"

I'm working on one piece of the project that I have named the Carnegie Hall Project.  We possess digitized copies of typescripts from two seasons of platforms presented at Carnegie Hall, and they are the current focus of some effort that will make them available online in the foreseeable future.  In the process of examining these files (digital only--the hard copies are still unlocated), I have discovered some "interesting" aspects of the dating of these documents.

First, Adler stated in his Founding Address that the Ethical Society would meet on Sundays.  He offered reasons that made sense at the time, and most Ethical Societies these days do hold their primary weekly meetings on Sundays, usually in the morning, but sometimes in the afternoon.

Second, indications from the New York Times coverage of these meetings in the 1890s indicates that NYSEC (and presumably the other early Societies) held their meetings in seasons which seemed to coincide roughly with the academic year.  If I understand correctly, the typical season began on the third Sunday in October and ended on the second (or third) Sunday in May, on which an anniversary speech would often be given.

The Carnegie Hall lectures for which we have digitized copies were given during the 1894-1895--or Nineteenth--Season, ending with the 19th Anniversary Address and the 1895-1896--or Twentieth--Season, ending with the 20th Anniversary Address.  (That sentence was harder to write than it might seem.)

Now, comparing a calendar for 1894 to the list of typescripts, I see that the first typescript is for November 4, so, if the season did begin in October, we are missing the record of the third and fourth Sundays.  (Did something happen to delay the season?  Are these records lost?)  I am also finding some potential for error in the use of calendars generated online (AI goofs?).  My "old reliable" yearly calendar template from Vertex gave 1894 dates a couple of days off, so I mistakenly developed a "theory" about all of the typescripts being dated as they were typed (on Tuesdays!) and not according to when the lectures were delivered.  (Oops! And that was a couple of hours wasted.)  A comparison to an image of a calendar printed in 1894 (thanks, Smithsonian!) set me straight--and serves as reminder that tracking the seasons for these early years of Ethical Culture can also be easier said than done.

Part of the Carnegie Hall Project is not only to publish (online or otherwise) the two seasons for which we have digital copies, but to locate the remaining seasons, running from 1893 to 1910.  One resource that I am looking at right now (because it is online, and I am in Texas) is the list of Finding Aids for the Felix Adler Papers at Columbia University.  Using 1893 and 1894 calendars, I am trying to track down any platforms that may be housed at Columbia with dates in the range of Season 18, the first season for lectures at Carnegie Hall.  I have managed to locate a few documents from that season, but in what format and whether actually delivered as addresses at Carnegie Hall needs further research.  Some of the files indicate dates ("Science and Ethics," April 22, 1894) but others give only the year or a month and the year.  Moreover, the documents listed comprise only half of the possible dates for Season 18, so there still remains the need (hope) to find more information in the NYSEC archives.  This whole process will be quite tedious--no joke!--but I believe it will be worth it to have a better understanding of these years at Carnegie Hall both for historical reasons but also for our contemporary Ethical consideration.  Issues do repeat themselves, and that's no joke either.

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.