Felix Adler (August_13, 1851–April_24, 1933) was a Jewish rationalist intellectual who founded the Society for Ethical Culture in New York, New York.

Chronology

Adler's family immigrated to the United States when he was six years of age on the occasion of his father Samuel Adler receiving an appointment as head rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in New York.

Felix graduated from Columbia University in 1870, and moved to Germany where he received a doctorate from Heidelberg University. Starting in 1874, he spent two years at Cornell University before his "dangerous attitude" caused him to leave.

He returned to New York and preached some sermons at the Temple Emanu-El in New York City where his father Samuel Adler was still the head rabbi. He was noted for omitting reference to God in any of his Sermons, an unorthodox approach which made him suspect by many of the New York Jewish community, and ended any thought of him succeeding his father.

Adler then 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.

In 1902, Adler was given the chair of political and social ethics at Columbia University, which he held until his deal in 1933.

Well known as a lecturer and writer, Felix Adler served as rector for the Ethical Culture School until his death in 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 became the founding chairman of the National Child Labor Committee in 1904. Lewis Hine became the committee's photographer in 1908.

In 1917, Adler served on the Civil Liberties Bureau which later becomes the American Civil Liberties Bureau, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

In 1928 Adler became president of the Eastern division of the American Philosophical Association.

Tenement house reform

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. Adler was not a proponent of free public housing, but he spoke out about tenant reform and the rents which he considered exorbitant. Jacob Riis wrote that Adler had "clear incisive questions that went through all subterfuges to the root of things."

In 1885, Adler and others 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 of Manhattan for the sum of $155,000. Even though critics favored restrictive legislation for improving tenement living, the model tenement was a progressive step forward.

American foreign policy

By the late 1890s 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.

Philosophy

Adler came to promote a secularized form of Judaism which he termed Ethical Culture , an essentially Kantian moral philosophy which prized public work and the use of reason to develop ultimate ethical standards. Adler published such works as Creed and Deed (1878) and Moral Instruction of Children (1892). He made use of the ideas from his religion, the philosophy of Kant & Ralph Waldo Emerson, mixed with certain socialistic ideas of his time. He believed that the concept of a personal God was unnecessary and that man's personality is the central force of religion, that different people's interpretations of religions were to be respected as religious things in themselves.

External links

• http://www.ecfs.org is the website of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School which contains much information, some of which was incorporated into this article.