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Who Was Felix Adler?
by Sue Berkon, Parent, Fieldston
first published in FieldNotes
Felix Adler, a German-American educator and social reformer, founded the New York Society for Ethical Culture in 1876 at the age of 24.
Adler's belief in deed rather than creed led the Society to foster two innovative projects.
In 1877, the Society sponsored Visiting Nursing where nurses and doctors, if necessary, visited the homebound sick in poor districts.
This service was eventually incorporated into the New York City health system. A year later, in 1878, a Free Kindergarten was established as a tuition-free school for workingmen's children.
It evolved over time into the Ethical Culture Fieldston School whose mission today of a diverse community and child-centered curriculum attempts to further Adler's original conviction that school and society should be creatively entwined.
Well known as a lecturer and writer, Felix Adler served as rector for the Ethical Culture School until his death in 1933.
He also held the chair of political and social ethics at Columbia University from 1902 to 1933.
Throughout his life, he always looked beyond the immediate concerns of family, labor, and race to the long-term challenge of reconstructing institutions like schools and government to promote greater justice in human relations.
Within Adler's ethical philosophy, cooperation rather than competition remained the higher social value.
Adler & Tenement House Reform
Adler's strong interest in tenement house reform is not generally known.
By the 1880's, massive immigration had created overcrowding in the city's 35,000 tenements.
As a member of the New York State Tenement House Commission, Felix Adler was concerned not only by overcrowding, but also by the increase in contagious disease caused by overcrowding.
Although Adler was not a proponent of free public housing, he was enraged by exorbitant rents charged by landlords.
His numerous public lectures on tenement reform issues attracted attention.
Jacob Riis, author of How the Other Half Lives (1890), admired Adler's "clear incisive questions that went through all subterfuges to the root of things."
In 1885, Adler and others devised a solution for the housing problem.
They created the Tenement House Building Company in order to build "model" tenements that rented for $8-$14/month.
By 1887, six model buildings had actually been erected on the Lower East Side for the sum of $155,000.
Even though critics favored restrictive legislation for improving tenement living, the model tenement was a progressive step forward.
Adler & American Foreign Policy
By the late 1890's with the increase in international conflicts, Adler switched his concern from domestic issues to the question of American foreign policy.
While some contemporaries viewed the 1898 Spanish American War as an act to liberate the Cubans from Spanish rule, others perceived the U.S. victories in the Caribbean and the Philippines as the beginning of an expansionist empire.
At first Adler supported the war, but later expressed anxiety about American sovereignty over the Philippines and Puerto Rico, concluding that an imperialistic, rather than a democratic goal was guiding U.S. foreign policy.
Just as Ethical Culture affirms "the supreme worth of the person", Adler superimposed this tenet on international relations believing that no single group had the claim to superior institutions and lifestyle.
Unlike many of his contemporaries during World War I, Adler did not feel that the defeat of Germany alone would make the world safe for democracy.
Peace could only be achieved, he thought, if the representative democratic governments remained non-imperialistic and if the armament race was curbed.
As a result, Adler opposed the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations.
As an alternative, Adler proposed a "Parliament of Parliaments" elected by the legislative bodies of the different nations and filled with different classes of people rather than special interests so that common and not national differences would prevail.
Life Highlights
1851 Born in Alzey, Germany, the son of a rabbi.
1857 Adler's father moves the family to New York as he becomes the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El.
1870 Adler receives A. B. from Columbia, and goes to Germany for further study but decides not to prepare for the rabbinate.
1874 Adler teaches Hebrew and Oriental languages at Cornell University for two years before his "dangerous attitudes" prompt his departure.
1876 Adler founds the New York Society of Ethical Culture at the age of 24.
1878 Adler opens a free kindergarten to children of the working poor in New York and San Francisco.
1877 Adler publishes first book, Creed and Deed.
1902 Adler is appointed Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Columbia University.
1904 Adler becomes first chairman of the National Child Labor Committee.
1917 Adler and other colleagues serve on the Civil Liberties Bureau which later becomes the American Civil Liberties Bureau.
1928 Adler named president of the Eastern division of the American Philosophical Association.
1933 Adler dies at the age of 81.