Stanton Coit

• Stanton Coit
• Born: August 11, 1857
• Died: February 15, 1944

Ethical Culture activist and the organizer of the first American settlement house, was born the fourth of seven children (of whom only he and two females survived childhood), in Columbus, Ohio, to Harvey Coit and Elizabeth (Greer) Coit. Descended from John Coit, who left England for America in the 1630s, Harvey Coit’s birthplace was Norwich, Massachusetts. Harvey Coit became a successful soft-goods merchandiser in Ohio. His wife, a native Ohioan, left the traditional Episcopal church and became a committed Spiritualist. She had a great influence upon her fourth child.

At the age of fifteen Stanton Coit was impressed by reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for a church of “pure ethics . . . formulated and concreted into a cultus. . . .” As a student at Amherst College, he expounded this idea to a schoolmate, who remarked that “you ought to hear Felix Adler, the radical! He is doing the very thing of which you are dreaming.” The following Monday, Coit went to Adler’s house and announced, “I have decided to be an Ethical Lecturer.” First, Coit finished at Amherst in 1879, staying an additional two years as an English literature tutor. Then he went to Columbia University, resided in urban squalor and assisted Adler, who had formed the Society for Ethical Culture. In 1883 Adler arranged for him to study idealist philosophy and Kant in Berlin with Georg von Gizycki, who was to become involved in the Ethical cause. The University of Berlin awarded Coit a Ph.D. degree in 1885, and he returned to New York City, after having spent three months in London’s East End, at Toynbee House, a university settlement.

With Toynbee House fresh in mind, Coit settled on the Lower East Side in 1886, bought a tenement at 146 Forsyth Street, between Delancey and Rivington streets, and began the Neighborhood Guild. His settlement house was the first of its kind, antedating Jane Addams’s Hull House by two years. The guild sparked a radical spirit among many student workers who resided with and shared the life of people they served. In his Neighborhood Guilds (1891) Coit said that if the masses could be organized mentally and morally, “the second step, the enlightenment of the people in social principles, could easily be made.” This step in turn would facilitate the realization of a “just state,” which would include trade unionization, the reduction of work hours, access to higher amusements and so forth. Coit wanted to reorganize the lower classes as guilds of approximately one hundred family units in each, thus destroying the slums and stimulating civic reform. Contrary to the views of many contemporary bourgeois reformers, he felt that workers could take care of their own concerns and generate their own leadership. The English settlements did not operate on this basis. The Neighborhood Guild enlisted the aid of clergy, activists, and labor organizers and sponsored gymnasiums, theater events, a preschool, talks and groups of young people reading about and engaging in wood crafts, public speaking, and similar activities. Coit’s experiment helped to inspire the Hudson Guild started by John Lovejoy Elliott, also an Ethical Culture leader. The Neighborhood Guild had difficulty surviving Coit’s departure for England in 1888, but two of its directors restructured it as the University Settlement. While in New York City, Coit worked hard for the Ethical Culture Society, teaching in its ethics classes for children and proselytizing. He taught also in the Workingman’s School.

In 1888 Coit was offered the ministry at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, London, a church that had been led by an abolitionist, Moncure D. Conway, and was already very close to the principles of Ethical Culture. There, Coit set up Neighborhood Guilds, which began in London and spread so that a lending library, five clubs, classes for adults, and free Sunday recitals had developed three years after his arrival. His talks at the chapel were popular, and membership increased twofold. In the 1890s he started and headed the West London Ethical Society, the Union of Ethical Societies, as well as the Moral Instruction League, which sought to make ethical instruction more temporal in private educational institutions. He organized the International Foundation for Moral and Religious Leadership, which enlisted and prepared men to come to the United States to serve as leaders of the Ethical Culture Society. In addition, Coit was editor of the Ethical World and participated in starting the International Journal of Ethics. And in 1898 he married Mrs. Fanny Adela Wetzler, a liberal l émigré from Germany who abetted his interest in women’s rights and bore him three daughters. They were Gwendolen E., Adela I., and Virginia.

Causing controversy, Coit began in 1909 an Ethical Church in Bayswater, a London neighborhood, after which he advanced the view that the Anglican church should become a center for Ethical Culture. To Adler and other American and British members in the Ethical movement, churches themselves and their ceremonies were alien. In his church Coit instituted an altar dedicated to man, a lecturer with a clerical robe, responsive readings in the Sunday meetings, and other traditional church rites with a ethical content. “We believe,” said Coit’s ethical creed, “in those who have sacrificed for truth, beauty, and righteousness; and we look to them as saviors of the world from error, ugliness, and sin.” Understood in their context the words of ecclesiastical derivation were intended to serve ethical purposes. George Bernard Shaw and other intellectuals attended his Ethical Church.

He wrote a two volume work Social Worship (1913), including orders of service and ceremonial directions. His scholarly desire to replace historic myths of the Christian church was affected by Sir John Seeley’s work, Natural Religion. Each country, Coit came to decide, required a state-operated church. The British Ethical Union, which Coit helped to develop, contributed ultimately to the growth of the British Humanist Society of Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley.

Coit was a significant if eccentric individual in the social welfare and the Ethical Culture movements. Theatrical, volatile, and outgoing, he devoted much effort to dealing with the ideas of Kant, Coleridge, Emerson, and scientific and socialist writers. This contributed to his settlement work and also to the ceremonialism that made him a paradox in the Ethical movement. Through the International Foundation, which sent trainees to the United States and through his work in England that introduced new people to ideas he had learned from Adler, he created bridges for the Ethical movement from one country to another. His attempt to create a church, however, marked his isolation from other Ethical Culturists. Later in his life he translated Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethik (1932) in three volumes. Coit was active as a Fabian and lost a bid for Parliament on the Labor party ticket in 1906. He is important for his settlement work in America and his role in building Ethical Culture in England before the First World War.

Some of Coit’s letters are in the Henry Demarest Lloyd Papers, at Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison Wisconsin. The library of the American Ethical Union in New York City has additional papers. Coit’s writings include National Idealism and a State Church (1907), National Idealism and the Book of Common Prayer (1908), The Soul of America (1914), and Two Responsive Services: In the Form and Spirit of the Litany and Ten Commandments for Use in Families, Schools and Churches (1911).

Biographical material includes H. B. Radest, Toward Common Ground: The Story of the Ethical Societies in the U.S. (1969); A. F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (1960); Amherst College Biographical Record, 1951; and on Coit’s family, in National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 11; The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 3, (1973). An obituary appeared in The Times of London, February 16, 1944.