John Lovejoy Elliott

• John Lovejoy Elliott
• Born: December 2, 1868
• Died: April 12, 1942

Social work leader, Ethical Culture pioneer, and a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, was born in Princeton, Illinois, the first of the four sons of Isaac Hughes Elliott and Elizabeth (Denham) Elliott. Isaac Elliott, of Scotch-Irish descent, was a graduate of the University of Michigan who became a captain in the 33d Illinois Regiment during the Civil War, rising to the rank of brigadier general. Although not wealthy, he managed to raise a family by his work on a farm in Princeton. His wife, a step-daughter of the abolitionist Owen Lovejoy, took particular pains to supplement the education her sons received in the area’s one-room schoolhouse. Under parental influence John Elliott developed a drive for his own autonomy and for more learning. He came into regular contact with unorthodox social and religious views from his father’s friend Robert Ingersoll, the agnostic, and became familiar with the writings of Paine and Voltaire Elliott labored on the farm, for which he developed strong feelings. He loved the “farm animals” and argued that “they had real personalities.”

Working his way through Cornell University, he became popular enough to be elected president of the senior class. He also came into contact with Felix Adler, who spoke at Cornell of his Ethical Culture movement, and who talked of a “new profession, one that endeavors to teach people how to live. ...” Later Elliott told Stanton Coit, another Ethical Culturist visiting the school, of his interest in the movement. Under the influence of Adler, who felt Elliott needed more sophisticated experience, he went to Germany to study at the University of Halle, there writing his doctoral dissertation “Prisons as Reformatories.” He derided the dueling societies he found in Germany.

In 1894 the New York board of trustees of the Ethical Culture Society hired Elliott for $700 a year as Adler’s assistant. As he taught, organized, lectured, and performed other functions for the society he came into touch with the exciting artistic, social and political milieu of New York City. He also came into contact with the urban poor, perceiving how desperate were their conditions of life, their struggle to earn a living, the crowding of their tenements, their distance from cultural enrichment. Moved, he founded, in 1895, the Hudson Guild, in the predominantly Irish neighborhood of Chelsea on the West Side of Manhattan, an early settlement house destined to be prominent in the social work activity of New York City. After establishing boys’ clubs and a kindergarten for the children of working mothers, the guild started a printshop for training children as apprentices, a cooperative store, and an employment bureau for unskilled women. It built a model tenement on West 28th Street with indoor plumbing and in cooperation with the Child Study Federation, the guild enrolled 200 Chelsea students in the first all-day summer play school in the city. In 1917 the guild received a 500-acre farm in New Jersey that it used to produce goods for its cooperative store. It also sponsored free outdoor movies in the summer, as well as sports, crafts, theater, music, science classes, citizenship courses, and trips to libraries and museums. The participation of the Chelsea residents in running guild activities was important to Elliott. More important than any of the programs, he thought, was “to develop the latent social power in the men and women, the boys and the girls.”

Involved in the Hudson Guild, Elliott became a leading figure in social reform in New York City, signing the petition for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and helping to establish the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920; he was an active member of its board until his death. His continuing activity was at the Society for Ethical Culture, whose senior leader he became when Felix Adler died in 1933. He served the society routinely as he spoke publicly, officiated at marriages and burials, and taught classes in ethics. Both his ethical and social work interests contributed to his endorsement of such causes as mothers’ pensions, juvenile courts, and prison reform during the progressive period and relief, conservation, and unemployment insurance during the New Deal. He was also concerned with the needs of people abroad, particularly with the refugees emigrating to America from Nazi oppression, and in 1938 he initiated and became the chairman of the Good Neighbor Committee. This group helped the refugees find employment and adjust themselves to their new homeland. Active in professional groups, Elliott was chairman of the National Federation of Settlements, 1919-23, head of the United Neighborhood Houses of New York, and a member of the State Committee on Education and the New York City Council of Social Agencies.

Personally, he was known for his love of music and art, for his spontaneous laughter and, perhaps most deeply, for his skill at working with children and the happiness this gave him.

Administrative routine did not seem to suit him, even the running of Hudson Guild. Criticized for being “absolutist,” he “pounded the arm of his chair and said, ‘I’m no absolutist but some things are absolutely right and some are absolutely wrong.’ “He could have harsh judgments about people and, at the same time, deep concern for human relationships and the plight of poor people, criminals, and blacks. Assisting young men from the slums who went to prison, and working with gangs to help them help themselves were constant projects. At the movies “he was looking at the children’s faces reflected from the light on the screen.” He never married.

In contrast to Adler, who was very much a psychologist, Elliott was a practical social worker sensitive to urban problems, with a religion of democracy more personal than Adler’s pure moral religion might suggest. More than Adler, Elliott believed in the pure natural goodness of man. As a leader in the Ethical Culture Society and the force behind the Hudson Guild, Elliott juggled the aristocratic Adlerian ethical world with the needs of social work downtown.

Two folders of Elliott’s correspondence, 1931-42, are in the papers of the Survey Associates; one folder, 1915-42 in the papers of the National Federation of Settlements; and some scattered correspondence in the papers of the United Neighborhood Houses of New York—all in the Social Welfare Historical Archives Center, University of Minnesota. Biographical sources include Ministry to Man: The Life of John Lovejoy Elliott (1959), and H. B. Radest, Toward Common Ground: The Story of the Ethical Societies in the U. S. (1969). See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3. Many articles about Elliott and by him appear in the Survey, the Survey Graphic, the Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, and, The New York Times, April 13, 1942.