Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [930]
The bishop’s letter provoked widespread discussion among New York’s Episcopal clergy and laity and led, the following year, to formation of the Church Association for the Advancement of the Interests of Labor (CAIL). With Potter, Huntington, and thirty-eight other bishops serving as vice-presidents, CAIL became the first powerful Protestant group to actively defend labor’s right to organize. More, it declared solidarity with labor’s struggle against slums, sweatshops, and child labor. Starting in 1891 Trinity held an annual celebration called Labor Sunday, tied to the new Labor Day, to which the Knights of Labor were invited to send delegates, and in which a red flag was borne in procession. Perhaps more impressive, given the vestry’s traditional tight-fistedness, was the decision of the diocese that same year to allocate church printing only to firms that paid union rates. In 1893 CAIL established a Board of Arbitration, with coequal representatives from capital, labor, and the public, to help settle strikes.
Others adopted still more radical stances. William Dwight Porter Bliss, a Boston Episcopalian clergyman, member of the Knights, and enthusiastic follower of Henry George, formed, in 1889, the Society of Christian Socialists, which soon started a chapter in New York City. The Bliss group advocated the eight-hour day, free technical education for workers, higher education for women, public employment of the unemployed, a municipal program of public housing and slum clearance, municipal ownership of public utilities, and national ownership of railroads, telegraphs, and mines.
There was in many of these initiatives a somewhat facile optimism, a reluctance to confront hard realities of power, a comforting conviction that there were no opponents to be overcome but only misguided adversaries to be enlightened. Nevertheless the Episcopalians’ pleas for social solidarity constituted a dramatic break with the bleak tooth-and-claw approach to which other Protestants had and still adhered.
CREED INTO DEED
If not all Protestants were social gospelites, neither were all social gospelites Protestant. The reform wing of Judaism—which assembled in Pittsburgh in 1885—expressed its concern about the “evils of the present organization of society.” But the forefront of the Jewish movement was occupied by a small number of highly assimilated activists, among whom the most preeminent was Felix Adler.
Adler, born in Germany in 1851, was brought to New York in 1857 when his father, Samuel Adler, was called to the rabbinate of Temple Emanu-El. The family settled near Stuyvesant Square, where his father raised him in the emerging Reform tradition, and his mother involved him in her work with such Jewish charities as the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Felix was disappointed with Columbia College, finding it mired in Christian parochialism, and much preferred his graduate work at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, where he was exposed to the problems of industrial society and a variety of proposed solutions.
Back in New York, Adler scotched expectations he would succeed his father in the Emanu-El pulpit when, in 1873, he preached a sermon called “The Judaism of the Future.” In it he embraced a secular, activist, and universalistic philosophy, rejecting prayer, ritual, and theology. Beginning in 1876 the austere Dr. Adler delivered Sunday morning lectures in Standard Hall on the need to translate “creed into deed” by struggling for social justice. The following year, the Society for Ethical Culture was incorporated, with Adler as its “lecturer”; its board, chaired by Joseph Seligman, included trustees ranging from Henry Morgenthau Sr. to Samuel Gompers.
Over the next decade, the Ethical Culture Society initiated a series of social innovations, including a free kindergarten, a district nursing program, and a Workingman’s School. Adler also fought political