(Originally published in 1890. 16 pages. This volume is pr...)
Originally published in 1890. 16 pages. This volume is produced from digital images from the Cornell University Library Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection
John Lovejoy Elliot was a 20th century Ethical Culture Leader and Social Worker. Mr. Elliott took part in a social reform during the Progressive Era and the New Deal.
Background
John Lovejoy Elliott was born on December 2, 1868 in Princeton, Illinois. He was the first of the four sons of Elizabeth (Denham) and Isaac Hughes Elliott.
His father, of Scotch-Irish descent, had graduated from the University of Michigan in 1861 before enlisting as a captain in the 33rd Illinois Regiment during the Civil War. He rose to the rank of brigadier general and, after the war, settled in his native Princeton, where he eked out a living as a struggling farmer and married a stepdaughter of the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy.
Education
Elliott attended local schools and then worked his way through Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Although his undergraduate record was generally undistinguished, he was popular with fellow students, who elected him president of his senior class.
Elliott graduated in 1892 and, after two years in Germany at the University of Halle, where he wrote a thesis on "Prisons as Reformatories", he earned a Ph. D. in philosophy.
Career
Elliott became Adler's assistant and protege in New York City. There he settled into a round of activities as teacher, lecturer, scholar, and organizer for the Society for Ethical Culture, activities that put him in daily contact with stimulating persons in the arts, society, and politics.
In New York, he also moved among the disadvantaged, observing firsthand the desperate social conditions of the poor, especially the immigrant poor, in their dilapidated and noisome neighborhoods.
As was the case with many young idealists of that generation, his conscience would not permit him to live sheltered from hardships suffered by others, and in 1895, he founded one of the great early settlement houses, the Hudson Guild, in the Chelsea district on the West Side of Manhattan, then a predominantly Irish neighborhood.
The Guild's programs began modestly enough with boys' clubs and a kindergarten for the children of working mothers but soon branched out to include a print shop for training children as apprentices, a cooperative store, an employment bureau for unskilled women, and a 500-acre New Jersey farm worked by Guild families.
There were also free outdoor movies in the summer, sports, crafts, dramatic productions, music, domestic science classes, citizenship courses, health clinics, guided trips to libraries and museums, and summer camps. Elliott insisted upon the participation of the neighbors themselves in the governance of settlement house affairs.
Though Elliott devoted himself to the Hudson Guild, he continued his duties at the Society for Ethical Culture, and in 1933, following Felix Adler's death, he became its senior leader.
He taught classes in ethics, spoke before groups, and officiated at marriages and burials. Both aspects of his career led him naturally to the espousal of social reform: mothers' pensions, juvenile courts, and prison reform during the Progressive Era; relief, conservation, and old age and unemployment insurance during the New Deal.
In 1938, moved by the plight of refugees escaping to America from tyranny in central Europe, he became the initiator and chairman of the Good Neighbor Committee, which labored into the war years to assist emigrants in finding jobs and in making places for themselves in their new communities.
Loyal to his profession, Elliott served as president of the National Federation of Settlements, 1919-23, and later as head of the United Neighborhood Houses of New York.
He died at the age of seventy-three in Mount Sinai Hospital, New York City; his ashes were buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Hawthorne, New York.
(Originally published in 1890. 16 pages. This volume is pr...)
Views
The chief purpose of the Hudson Guild that Elliott had found, was one that transcended all of the programs, was "to develop the latent social power in the men and women, the boys and the girls. "
It was a method and a principle to which Elliott himself could not always adhere, for however deeply he was committed to democratic ways, to self-determination of persons and communities.
Quotations:
"The greatest personalities that ever existed have been those who united human beings and put them on the road toward cooperation and effectiveness and peace. Those whom the world has held highest have helped to unite and not sever interconnectedness. They have not been the destroyers of differences but the harmonizer of differences. "
"I have known many good people who did not believe in God. But I have never known a human being who was good who did not believe in people. "
Membership
John Lovejoy Elliott was a member of the State Committee on Education and the New York City Council of Social Agencies.
Personality
From both parents young Elliott acquired a fierce independence of character and a passion for learning, and from Robert Ingersoll, his father's friend and a regular guest in the Elliott home, he derived many of his social and religious views.
A man of deep passions, he loved both contemplation and action. He was a naturally provocative and skilled teacher who was happiest when working with children.
Elliott was by temperament impatient and, when frustrated, given to sudden, violent fits of temper.
His friends and acquaintances, however, remembered most vividly the spontaneity and infectious quality of his laugh.
Connections
Elliott never married, perhaps, as his biographer suggests, because he could not find a woman quite the equal of his mother.