Joel Elias Spingarn

• Joel Elias Spingarn
• Born: May 17, 1875
• Died: July 26, 1939

Black-rights advocate, was born in New York City, the first of four sons born to Elias Spingarn, a well-to-do tobacco merchant who had emigrated from Austria as a youth, and Sarah (Barnett) Spingarn, who had been born in England. Spingarn was educated in New York City at the Collegiate Institute, City College, and Columbia College, from which he received an A.B. in 1895 and a Ph.D. in 1899; he also did graduate work at Harvard University. In December 1895 he married Amy Einstein, a sister of the American diplomat and scholar Lewis Einstein. Their marriage produced two daughters, Hope and Honor, and two sons, Stephen Joel and Edward David Woodberry.

In 1899 Spingarn was appointed assistant to his mentor at Columbia, George E. Woodberry, in the new Department of Comparative Literature, and his dissertation, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, was published. This work was translated into Italian in 1905 and has been reprinted numerous times. Spingarn was appointed adjunct professor in 1904 and full professor in 1909; the following year he succeeded Woodberry as head of the department. His The New Criticism (1911) combined Matthew Arnold’s practical humanism and Walter Pater’s estheticism with the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce’s theories of expression in an effort to place the work of art out of the reach of partisan ideologies and socioeconomic explications. Spingarn was the author of other books of criticism, including Creative Criticsm (1917) and Poetry and Religion (1924), and of books of poetry, including The New Hesperides (1911) and Poems (1924); he was also the editor of the twenty-five-volume European Library (1920-24).

In 1911, as a result of a dispute with Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler on an issue of free speech at the university, Spingarn was dismissed from the faculty. Thereafter he continued his scholarly career indpendently, occasionally teaching at the New School for Social Research. In 1911 he bought the Amenia Times in Amenia, New York, where his country estate was located, and became a newspaper publisher. In 1919 he helped found the publishing house of Harcourt, Brace and Company serving as its literary adviser until 1924.

From the beginning, Spingarn combined scholarship with political activity; his example encouraged other educated people to do the same. In 1908 he was the unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress in New York City’s traditionally Democratic 18th District. In 1912 and 1916 he was a delegate to the national conventions of the Progressive party. Spingarn’s dismissal from Columbia in 1911 occurred at the same time that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was being formed, and he became a leading figure in the association.

In the fall of 1910, Spingarn contributed $100 to the defense fund of a black man accused of murdering his former landlord, a white man. He was nominated by Oswald Garrison Villard for membership on the NAACP’s executive committee, and the nomination was seconded by W. E. B. Du Bois. Early in the following year Spingarn, acting as an officer of the NAACP’s New York Vigilance Committee, accompanied a group of black men to a theater; when they were refused tickets, he helped the Vigilance Committee win a suit against the theater’s management. He contributed to the formation of the association’s program for combating racial discrimination and took on the tasks of publicizing the NAACP and establishing local branches.

Resurrecting the spirit of the nineteenth-century abolitionists, Spingarn in 1913 began a campaign he called the New Abolition, which sought to foster cultural nationalism among blacks. In 1913, the year in which he became chairman of the board of the NAACP, he established the Spingarn Medal, awarded annually to the black man or woman of African descent who has attained high achievement in any endeavor. In 1919 he became the association’s treasurer and from 1930 until his death he served as president, succeeded by his brother, Arthur B. Spingarn.

After war was declared in Europe in 1914, Spingarn, though nearly fifty, prepared himself for military service, attending training camps at Plattsburgh, New York, and elsewhere. In 1917 he enlisted in the army and was one of two officer candidates for the infantry to be graduated as a major. Assigned to the 78th Division at Camp Dix, New Jersey, Spingarn suffered a physical collapse but went on to serve in military intelligence in Washington, D.C., where he pressed for a program to train black officers. Largely through his efforts, a training camp was established at Des Moines, Iowa, and about one thousand black officers were commissioned during World War I. After his service in Washington, Spingarn traveled to France with the American Expeditionary Forces, and after the war he remained in the reserves, becoming a lieutenant colonel. He was a delegate to the convention that established the American Legion in 1919 and was the first commander of the Amenia Post.

Retiring to his country estate, Troutbeck, Spingarn devoted himself to the cultivation of flowers; his collection of 200 species of clematis was said to be the largest in the world, and he received several honors for his horticultural efforts. He died of a cerebral thrombosis at his New York City home at the age of sixty-four and was buried in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Though it emphasizes Spingarn’s literary career perhaps more than the general reader will appreciate, M. Van Deusen, J. E. Spingarn (1971), is a sensitive biographical study. B. J. Ross, J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911-1939 (1972), is another specialized life. These modern accounts, especially Van Deusen’s, offer good bibliographical information. A brief biography appears in the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 2 (1944). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, July 27, 1939.