American Prometheus Read Online Free PDF Page B

Jewish membership.
    Thus, by the end of the 1870s, Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Society provided New York Jewish society with a timely vehicle for dealing with this mounting bigotry. Philosophically, Ethical Culture was as deist and republican as the Founding Fathers’ revolutionary principles. If the revolution of 1776 had brought with it an emancipation of American Jews, well, an apt response to nativist Christian bigotry was to become more American— more republican—than the Americans. These Jews would take the next step to assimilation, but they would do it, so to speak, as deist Jews. In Adler’s view, the notion of Jews as a nation was an anachronism. Soon he began creating the institutional structures that would make it practical for his adherents to lead their lives as “emancipated Jews.”
    Adler insisted that the answer to anti-Semitism was the global spread of intellectual culture. Interestingly, Adler criticized Zionism as a withdrawal into Jewish particularism: “Zionism itself is a present-day instance of the segregating tendency.” For Adler, the future for Jews lay in America, not Palestine: “I fix my gaze steadfastly on the glimmering of a fresh morning that shines over the Alleghenies and the Rockies, not on the evening glow, however tenderly beautiful, that broods and lingers over the Jerusalem hills.”
    To transform his Weltanschauung into reality, Adler founded in 1880 a tuition-free school for the sons and daughters of laborers called the Workingman’s School. In addition to the usual subjects of arithmetic, reading and history, Adler insisted that his students should be exposed to art, drama, dance and some kind of training in a technical skill likely to be of use in a society undergoing rapid industrialization. Every child, he believed, had some particular talent. Those who had no talent for mathematics might possess extraordinary “artistic gifts to make things with their hands.” For Adler, this insight was the “ethical seed—and the thing to do is to cultivate these various talents.” The goal was a “better world,” and thus the school’s mission was to “train reformers.” As the school evolved, it became a showcase of the progressive educational reform movement, and Adler himself fell under the influence of the educator and philosopher John Dewey and his school of American pragmatists.
    While not a socialist, Adler was spiritually moved by Marx’s description in Das Kapital of the plight of the industrial working class. “I must square myself,” he wrote, “with the issues that socialism raises.” The laboring classes, he came to believe, deserved “just remuneration, constant employment, and social dignity.” The labor movement, he later wrote, “is an ethical movement, and I am with it, heart and soul.” Labor leaders reciprocated these sentiments; Samuel Gompers, head of the new American Federation of Labor, was a member of the New York Society for Ethical Culture.
    Ironically, by 1890 the school had so many students that Adler felt compelled to subsidize the Ethical Culture Society’s budget by admitting some tuition-paying students. At a time when many elite private schools were closing their doors to Jews, scores of prosperous Jewish businessmen were clamoring to have their children admitted to the Workingman’s School. By 1895, Adler had added a high school and renamed the school the Ethical Culture School. (Decades later, it was renamed the Fieldston School.) By the time Robert Oppenheimer enrolled in 1911, only about ten percent of the student body came from a working-class background. But the school nevertheless retained its liberal, socially responsible outlook. These sons and daughters of the relatively prosperous patrons of the Ethical Culture Society were infused with the notion that they were being groomed to reform the world, that they were the vanguard of a highly modern ethical gospel. Robert was a star student.
    Needless to say, Robert’s