In April 1886, Weston invited Walter L. Sheldon (1858-1907) to give a
lecture series on the aims of the Ethical Society to an audience of
fifty people in St. Louis. Weston had met Sheldon four years earlier
while studying philosophy in Berlin. After the lecture series,
supporters of the movement founded the Society for Ethical Culture of
St. Louis. Felix Adler provided the new society's opening address.
Upon the group's invitation, Walter Sheldon became the lecturer and
leader of the St. Louis society in November 1886. He remained in that
position until his death in June 1907.
Sheldon was raised in Vermont and received his undergraduate education
at Middlebury College and Princeton. He enrolled in October 1881 at
the University of Berlin where S. Burns Weston introduced him to the
Ethical Movement. Sheldon returned to New York with Weston in 1883 and
began work with the Ethical Society as an editor and director of the
Young Men's Union. After his appointment to the St. Louis Society,
Sheldon lectured at the Pickwick Theatre on Washington Avenue until a
permanent residence for the Society was established at the original
St. Louis Art Museum's Memorial Hall on 19th and Locust.
The St. Louis society adopted a constitution and bylaws at a meeting
chaired by Mr. James Taussig in November 1886. It incorporated under
the name "Society for Ethical Culture in St. Louis" on May 14, 1887.
The Society formally changed its name to the popularly used "Ethical
Society of St. Louis" in August 1896.
In addition to Sunday lecture series and services, the Ethical Society
organized clubs and classes to discuss politics and literature from an
ethical standpoint. In 1891 it founded the Greek Ethics Club, a
women's group directed by Walter Sheldon in the study of Greek and
World literature. The Political Science Club was founded in 1892 to
arrange speaking engagements by political leaders, scholars and local
citizens. In January 1901, the Society founded the "Colored People's
Self-Improvement Federation" which organized an annual course of
lectures for blacks. Blacks were excluded from the Society's regular
programs.
In March 1888 the Society opened free reading rooms for wage earners
on the second floor of a dairy located on Franklin Avenue. It also
established a kindergarten for children under six years old directed
by its Ladies Philanthropic Club under the leadership of Society
member Martha Fischel. In December 1888 the Society created the
Domestic Economy School to teach homemaking skills to working class
women for personal use and self-reliance, not as training for
employment.
As the practical philanthropies of the Society grew, it rented a
building on 18th and Washington and opened a "Self-Culture Hall," or
free community school for working people. The Self-Culture Hall
offered lecture programs for working women on Thursday evenings,
another lecture series on Friday, a variety of social activities
including concerts and excursions, and provided reading rooms for use
by men on evenings and Sundays. The Society incorporated a separate
Self-Culture Association in June 1893 which bought the rental property
three years later.
Walter Sheldon hired E.N. Plank as assistant lecturer and assigned him
to direct the work of the hall. Plank was later succeeded by the
Ethical Society's Sunday School superintendent W. H. Lighty. Roger
Baldwin, who later became president of the American Civil Liberties
Union, also served as a director of the Self-Culture Hall. The
Association opened a second Self-Culture Hall in South St. Louis in
1895. Several other halls were opened and closed in St. Louis
neighborhoods as community interests dictated. The Self-Culture Hall
was subsumed by St. Louis' Neighborhood Association on North 21st
Street in 1911.
Sheldon led the Self-Culture Association until the fall of 1905,
thereafter remaining as an ex-officio board member while continuing
his work as lecturer and leader of the Society. In addition to his
Sunday lectures, Sheldon published addresses and pamphlets on ethical
culture and wrote several books: An Ethical Sunday School (New York:
1900); Lessons in the Study of Habits (Chicago: 1903); A Study of the
Divine Comedy of Dante (Philadelphia: 1905); and Summer Greetings From
Japan (St. Louis: 1908). After a nine-month illness, Walter Sheldon
died in June 1907 of "a complications of diseases caused by overwork"
according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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